ENGLISH    mEN    OF   LETTEI^S 

JOHN  1^/SKIJV 


ENGLISH   mEN   OF   LETrE^S 


JOHN    RUSKIN 


BY 


FREDERIC     HARRISON 


\ 
C 


LONDON:     MACMILLAN    ^    CO.,    LIMITED 
NINETEEN     HUNDRED     AND     THREE 


^''"^nji, 


Copyright  in  U.S.A. 


First  Edition,  September  1902 

Reprinted  October  and  December  1902 

October  VM3 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

CHAPTER    I 
Birth  and  Childhood     .,..,..        1 


CHAPTER    II 
First  Literary  Efforts 19 

CHAPTER    III 
Love — Oxford — Turner 30 

CHAPTER    IV 
"Modern  Painters" 41 

CHAPTER    V 
"The  Seven  Lamps  of  Architecture"         ...      52 

CHAPTER    VI 
"The  Stones  of  Venice" 63 

CHAPTER    VII 
Society — Criticism — Lecturing 78 

CHAPTER  VIII 
As  Social  Reformer       ,        :        r        •        %        '       .      9J 


vr  JOHN  RUSKIN 

PAOE 

CHAPTER    IX 
The  Ethics  of  Work  and  of  Art        ....     109 

CHAPTER    X 
Slade  Professor — Oxford — Lectures  ....     121 

CHAPTER    XI 
At  Oxford — Work  and  Influence       ....     138 

CHAPTER    Xll 
Illness — Disappointment — Retirement         .        .        .     151 

CHAPTER    XIII 

Social  Experiments — Guild  of  St.  George         .        .     164 

CHAPTER    XIV 
"FoRS  Clavtgera" 181 

CHAPTER    XV 
"Pr^terita" 197 

CHAPTER    XVI 
Last  Days 207 

Index 211 


JOHN    EUSKIN 

1819-1900 
CHAPTER    I 

BIRTH  AND   CHILDHOOD 

On  the  publication  of  the  first  volume  of  Modern 
PainterSj  Sydney  Smith,  the  acknowledged  oracle  of 
the  Edinburgh  Revieio  and  of  cultured  society,  is 
reported  to  have  declared  that  "it  was  a  work  of 
transcendent  talent,  presented  the  most  original  views, 
and  the  most  elegant  and  powerful  language,  and 
would  work  a  complete  revolution  in  the  world  of 
taste"  (Frceterita,  ii.  165). 

And  so  it  was.  The  writer  of  the  Victorian  era  who^ 
poured  forth  the  greatest  mass  of  literature  upon  the 
greatest  variety  of  subjects,  about  whom  most  was 
written  in  his  own  lifetime  in  Europe  and  in  America, 
who  in  the  English-speaking  world  left  the  most  direct 
and  most  visible  imprint  of  his  tastes  and  thoughts — 
was  John  Euskin.  For  fifty  years  continuously  he 
wrote,  lectured,  and  talked  about  Mountains,  Rivers, 
and  Lakes ;  about  Cathedrals  and  Landscapes ;  about 
Geology ;  about  Minerals,  Architecture,  Painting,  Sculp- 
ture, Music,  Drawing,  Political  Economy,  Education, 
Poetry,  Literature,  History,  Mythology,  Socialism,  j 
Theology,  Morals.  -  J 


2  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

The  author  of  more  than  eighty  distinct  works  upon 
so  miscellaneous  a  field,  of  masses  of  poetry,  lectures, 
letters  as  well  as  substantial  treatises,  was  of  necessity 
rather  a  stimulus  than  an  authority — an  influence 
rather  than  a  master.  As  one  of  his  foreign  admirers 
has  said — the  readers  of  Ruskin  are  charmed,  inspired, 
more  than  convinced,  ^e  is  a  moralist,  an  evangelist 
— not  a  philosopher  or  a  man  of  science.  )  But  the  union 
of  marvellous  literary  power,  with  encyclopasdic  studies 
of  Nature  and  of  Art,  both  illumined  with  burning 
enthusiasm  as  to  all  things  moral  and  social,  combined 
to  form  one  of  the  most  fascinating  personalities  of  the 
nineteenth  century. 

The  man  himself  issued  a  mass  of  biographical 
matter,  full  of  naivete,  candour,  and  charm.  And  as 
many  biographies  of  him  already  exist,  together  with 
scores  of  studies  of  his  work  and  influence  both  in 
English  and  in  various  European  languages,  it  might 
be  thought  that  no  need  remained  for  any  fresh  bio- 
graphy of  any  kind.  But  the  extant  materials  for  a 
biography  are  so  voluminous,  so  dispersive,  and  often 
so  much  entangled  with  other  matter,  that  it  is  believed 
there  is  still  room  for  a  plain  volume  such  as  this, 
which  would  condense  the  story  in  accessible  form 
and  denote  his  place  in  English  literature.  And  the 
directors  of  this  series  could  not  venture  to  omit  a 
Man  of  Letters  who  was  one  of  the  greatest  masters 
of  prose  in  English  literature,  and  one  of  the  dominant 
influences  of  the  Victorian  epoch. 

I  have  been  asked  to  undertake  the  task,  which  with 
real  hesitation  I  accept.  Though  an  ardent  admirer 
of  the  moral,  social,  and  artistic  ideals  of  John  Ruskin 
myself,  I  am  sworn  in  as  a  disciple  of  a  very  difi'erent 


I.]  BIRTH  AND  CHILDHOOD  3 

school,  and  of  a  master  whom  he  often  denounced. 
As  a  humble  lover  of  his  magnificent  power  of  lan- 
guage, I  have  studied  it  too  closely  not  to  feel  all  its 
vices,  extravagances,  and  temptations.  I  am  neither 
Socialist  nor  Plutonomist ;  and  so  I  can  feel  deep  sym- 
pathy for  his  onslaught  on  our  modern  life,  whilst 
I  am  far  from  accepting  his  trenchant  remedies.  I 
had  abundant  means  for  judging  his  beautiful  nature 
and  his  really  saintly  virtues,  for  my  personal  acquaint- 
ance with  him  extended  over  forty  years.  I  remember 
him  in  1860  at  Denmark  Hill,  in  the  lifetime  of  both 
his  parents,  and  in  the  heyday  of  his  fame  and  his 
power.  I  saw  him  and  heard  him  lecture  from  time 
to  time,  received  letters  from  him,  and  engaged  in 
some  controversies  with  him,  both  public  and  private. 
I  was  his  colleague  as  a  teacher  at  the  Working  Men's 
College  and  as  a  member  of  the  Metaphysical  Society. 
And  towards  the  close  of  his  life  I  visited  him  at 
Brantwood,  and  watched,  with  love  and  pain,  the  latest 
flickering  of  his  indomitable  spirit.  If  admiration, 
affection,  common  ideals,  aims,  and  sympathies,  can 
qualify  one  who  has  been  bred  in  other  worlds  of 
belief  and  hope  to  judge  fairly  the  life-work  of  a 
brilliant  and  noble  genius,  then  I  may  presume  to  tell 
all  I  knew  and  all  I  have  felt  of  the  "  Oxford  graduate  " 
of  1842,  who  was  laid  to  rest  in  Coniston  Churchyard 
in  1900. 

John  Ruskin,  born  in  London,  was  a  Scot  of  the 
Scots,  his  father  and  his  mother  being  grandchildren 
of  one  John  Euskin  of  Edinburgh.  Both  parents  and 
he  himself  passed  much  of  their  early  life  in  Scotland, 
where  he  had  many  Scotch  cousins,  and  whence  he 


4  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

ultimately  took   a   Scotch  wife.      He   talked  with   a 
Lowland  accent,  and  his  dominant  tone  of  mind  was 
a  mysterious   amalgam  of   John  Knox,   Carlyle,   andJ 
Walter  Scott. 

Though  the  author  of  Prceterita  assures  us  that  he 
knows  next  to  nothing  of  his  ancestry,  and  enlarges 
with  delightful,  and  perhaps  somewhat  studied  candour, 
about  some  worthy  but  humble  relations,  one  family 
being  that  of  a  tanner  at  Perth,  and  the  other  the 
keeper  of  an  inn  at  Croydon,  the  curiosity  of  his 
friends  and  relations  has  discovered  a  very  honour- 
able descent  for  this  Socialist  Cavalier.  His  paternal 
grandmother  is  traced  back  to  the  Adairs  of  South 
Calloway,  a  race  said  to  be  originally  Gallgaedhel, 
Vikings  of  mixed  Celtic  and  Scandinavian  blood,  and 
to  the  Agnews,  a  Norman  stock  settled  in  North 
Calloway.  John  Adair,  the  Laird  of  Little  Genoch, 
married  Mary  Agnew,  a  near  kinswoman  of  the  famous 
soldier.  Sir  Andrew  Agnew  of  Lochnaw,  hereditary 
sheriff  of  Galloway,  and  the  hero  of  Dettingen.  Their 
son.  Captain  Thomas  Adair,  of  Little  Genoch,  married 
Jean  Ross,  of  Bals?rroch,  great-aunt  of  Sir  John  Ross, 
the  Arctic  explorer,  of  Sir  Hew  Dalrymple  and  of 
Field  Marshal  Sir  Hew  Dalrymple  Ross.  Catherine, 
daughter  of  Captain  Adair  and  Jean  Ross,  married 
the  Reverend  James  Tweddale  of  Glenluce ;  and  their 
daughter,  Catherine,  married  John  Ruskin  of  Edin- 
burgh, grandfather  of  the  author.  This  James  Twed- 
dale of  Glenluce,  of  an  old  family  of  Covenanters,  was 
the  holder  of  the  original  Covenant,  confided  to  his 
care  by  Baillie  of  Jerviswood  when  on  his  way  to 
death  in  the  persecution.  And  from  the  same  James 
Tweddale    of    Glenluce    is    descended    Joan    Ruskin 


1.]  BIRTH  AND  CHILDHOOD  5 

Agnew,  now  Mrs.  Arthur  Severn,  a  daughter  of 
George  Agnew,  hereditary  Sheriff-Clerk  of  Wigtown. 

All  this  seems  to  have  been  unknown  to  our  author, 
but  it  is  put  forth  with  full  particulars  in  the  Life 
compiled  by  his  own  secretary  under  the  care  of  the 
family.  And  if  it  failed  to  interest  John  Euskin  him- 
self, it  may  furnish  a  mine  of  conjectures  and  inferences 
of  hereditary  and  race  influence,  when  we  start  with 
a  family  tree  which  embraces  Vikings,  Norman  knights, 
Gaelic  chiefs,  hereditary  sherifts  of  Galloway,  famous 
soldiers,  admirals,  explorers,  Covenanting  ministers, 
Puritans,  and  doctors  —  men  who,  in  civilian  and 
martial  office,  appear  in  the  history  of  our  country. 
It  is  a  genealogy  in  which  Sir  Walter  Scott  would 
have  revelled,  and  may  serve  to  explain  the  passion 
of  Ruskin  for  Scott  and  his  gallery  of  characters.  And 
it  is  indeed  somewhat  curious  that  in  his  Autobiography 
our  author  dilates  with  a  sort  of  inverted  pride  on  the 
career  of  his  mother,  Margaret  Cox,  the  daughter  of 
a  Yarmouth  seaman,  and  of  the  landlady  of  the  King's 
Head  at  Croydon ;  of  his  aunt,  the  wife  of  the  baker 
of  Croydon;  and  of  his  other  aunt,  the  wife  of  the 
tanner  of  Perth.  But  we  may  remember  that  an  inde- 
fatigable reader  of  Scott  would  delight  in  this  mixture 
of  mediaeval  chivalry  with  the  domestic  simplicities  of 
Perthshire  and  of  Surrey. 

Be  this  as  it  may,  as  the  heralds  say,  and  whether 
the  Euskins  were  originally  Erskines,  or  Eoskeens,  or 
Eogerkins,  or  Eoughskins,  certain  it  is,  or  seems  to  be, 
that  John  Euskin,  the  grandfather,  a  handsome  and 
daring  youth  of  twenty,  ran  away  in  1781  with 
Catherine  Tweddale,  a  bright  and  brave  girl  of  six- 
teen.     They  lived  in  the  Old  Town  of   Edinburgh, 


6  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

where  they  entertained  a  cultivated  society,  and  were 
intimate  with  Dr.  Thomas  Brown,  the  metaphysician, 
and  other  people  of  mark  and  position.  Their  only  son, 
John  James  Ruskin,  born  in  1785,  was  sent  to  the 
High  School  of  Edinburgh  under  Dr.  Adam,  and  had 
a  thorough  classical  education. 

Early  in  the  century,  John  James  Ruskin,  then  aged 
twenty-two,  having  finished  his  education  at  Edin- 
burgh, and  furnished  with  good  advice  by  Dr.  Thomas 
Brown,  who  regarded  him  as  a  man  of  much  promise, 
went  up  to  London  and  engaged  himself  as  a  clerk  in 
the  wine  trade  in  the  famous  firm  of  Sir  W.  Gordon, 
Murphy  and  Co  Here  he  made  his  mark,  and  impressed 
so  strongly  hie  fellow-clerk,  Mr,  Peter  Domecq,  the 
owner  of  most  valuable  vineyards  at  Macharnudo,  in 
Spain,  the  centre  of  the  sherry  trade,  that  it  was 
agreed  to  form  a  new  partnership.  Ruskin,  Telford, 
and  Domecq  was  the  new  firm,  founded  in  1809,  wherein 
Domecq  was  owner  of  the  rich  Spanish  \'ineyard, 
Telford  contributed  the  money  capital,  and  Ruskin 
was  senior  partner  and  responsible  head.  No  business 
house  could  have  more  congenial  partners,  a  more 
solid  basis,  and  more  efficient  management. 

It  was  otherwise  with  the  afi'airs  of  John  Ruskin, 
the  grandfather,  who  was  also  in  a  wine  business  in 
Edinburgh.  "More  magnificent  in  his  expenditure 
than  mindful  of  his  familj^,"  as  his  son  wrote  long 
years  afterwards,  "indiscriminate  and  boundless  in  his 
hospitalities,"  the  elder  John  Ruskin  ruined  his  health 
and  lost  his  fortune,  and  died  about  1812  deeply  in 
debt.  John  James  Ruskin,  his  son,  toiled  in  London 
to  pay  ofi"  his  father's  debts,  worked  his  firm's  busi- 
ness practically  himself,  undertook  the  correspondence, 


I.]  BIRTH  AND  CHILDHOOD  7 

directed  the  growths  of  sherry,  and  the  importation 
from  time  to  time,  and  ultimately  founded  a  very  con- 
siderable fortune.  By  nine  years  of  assiduous  work 
he  paid  off  the  debts  of  his  father,  secured  a  com- 
petence for  himself,  and  became,  as  his  son  wrote  on 
his  tombstone,  "an  entirely  honest  merchant."  At 
last  he  felt  himself  in  a  position  to  marry  the  woman 
whom  years  before  he  had  asked  to  be  his  wife. 

Margaret  Cox,  first  cousin  of  John  James,  was  the 
daughter  of  John  Euskin's  sister  by  Captain  Cox,  a 
master  mariner  in  the  herring  trade,  whose  widow 
maintained  herself  by  keeping  the  King's  Head  at 
Croydon.  The  girl  was  brought  up  at  the  Croydon 
day-school,  tall  and  handsome,  able  and  resolute,  a 
model  housekeeper  and  a  severe  Bible  Christian.  She 
was  four  years  older  than  John  James,  and  at  the 
age  of  twenty  had  been  sent  for  to  Scotland  to  keep 
house  for  John  E-uskin's  widow,  where  she  became 
the  counsellor  and  friend  of  her  young  cousin.  After 
nine  years  of  toil  and  of  waiting,  John  James  went  up 
to  Edinburgh,  claimed  his  bride,  overcame  her  remain- 
ing doubts,  and  they  were  married  February  1818, 
very  quietly  and  almost  secretly,  and  came  up  to 
London.  There,  at  54  Hunter  Street,  Brunswick 
Square,  on  8th  February  1819,  our  famous  WTiter 
was  born. 

It  is,  perhaps,  not  idle  to  dwell  on  all  the  various 
strains  of  heredity  which  may  have  influenced  the 
nature  of  this  remarkable  child ;  and  those  who  love 
to  trace  the  marks  of  ancestry  in  the  offspring  may 
have  unusual  ground  for  it  in  this  case.  John  Euskin 
was  an  only  child,  the  son  of  parents  themselves  first 
cousins,  who  were  of  set  character  and  no  longer  young 


8  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

at  his  birth.  He  lived  with  his  parents  continuously 
until  their  deaths,  at  the  ages  respectively  of  seventy- 
nine  and  ninety.  It  is  rare  that  any  son  is  so  abso- 
lutely home-bred,  home-reared,  and  nursed  till  long 
past  middle  life  by  parents  of  indomitable  will,  who 
devoted  their  whole  lives  to  the  single  object  of  making 
the  most  of  their  wonderful  child,  according  to  their 
own  lights.  Few  brains  and  few  characters  have  been 
more  profoundly  influenced  by  the  circumstances,  acci-; 
dents,  and  bonds  of  their  family  life.  The  father  was; 
a  man  of  singular  prudence,  patience,  practical  talent, 
conventional  views  of  life,  and  fine  taste.  The  mother 
was  a  woman  of  great  power,  indomitable  will,  harsh 
nature,  and  an  almost  saturnine  religion.  His  grand- 
father Ruskin  was  a  jovial  and  reckless  spendthrift; 
his  grandfather  Cox  was  a  seaman  who  was  killed  by 
an  accident  in  riding.  His  grandmother  Euskin  was 
a  brave  high-spirited  woman,  who  made  a  runaway 
match  at  sixteen ;  his  grandmother  Cox  was  an  indus- 
trious keeper  of  an  inn.  The  family  tree  contains  stern 
Covenanters,  dashing  soldiers,  prudent  men  of  trade, 
and  proud  West  country  lau^ds.  Who  could  have 
imagined  that  the  child  of  these  canny,  reckless,  stern, 
jovial  men  of  pleasure,  men  of  conscience,  and  men 
of  toil — of  these  plodding  tradesmen  and  of  these 
daring  spirits — would  be  the  author  of  Modern  Paiiders, 
of  Fors,  and  Unto  this  Lastl  The  fascination  of 
pedigree-hunting  no  doubt  lies  in  its  inscrutable 
conundrums. 

The  infancy  of  the  child  has  been  told  with  curious 
simplicity  by  the  author  himself ;  and  the  early  remin- 
iscences in  PrcBterita  and  Fors  are  an  almost  unique 
revelation  of  the  childhood  of  a  man  of  genius,  narrated 


1.]  BIRTH  AND  CHILDHOOD  9 

by  a  master  of  expression  and  subtle  humour.  It  was 
a  home  of  narrow  conventionalities,  severe  order,  and 
indefatigable  care — almost  gloomy  in  its  rigid  rules, 
and  sternly  exclusive  of  the  world  without.  The  infant 
was  often  whipped,  was  not  allowed  any  pretty  toys, 
was  surrounded  by  things  forbidden,  and  was  forced  to 
read  the  Bible  aloud  day  by  day.  From  infancy  to 
manhood  he  had  to  read  two  or  three  chapters  word 
by  word  to  his  mother,  with  all  the  genealogies  and 
hard  names,  not  omitting  the  grossness  of  phrase.} 
And  to  this  daily  reading  of  the  Bible  he  very  justly  \ 
attributes  his  power  of  taldng  pains  and  "the  best| 
part  of  his  taste  in  literature."  He  constantly  and 
most  rightly  insists  on  this  point.  And  perhaps  only 
those  'who  from  early  life  have  been  saturated  with 
the  grand  music  of  Scripture  can  quite  understand 
what  a  matchless  education  in  language  this  habit  can 
become  to  a  serious  nature  and  a  sensitive  ear. 

Pope's  Homer  and  Walter  Scott  were  also  "his 
chosen  masters,"  whom  he  read  as  soon  as  he 
could  read  at  all,  and  as  often  as  he  could  get  a 
chance.  On  Sundays  he  had  Hobinson  Crusoe  and  the 
Pilgrim's  Progress.  And  somewhat  later  his  father 
read  aloud  to  him  Shakespeare,  Byron,  Don  Quixote, 
and  Pope;  and  these,  being  a  man  of  sound  training 
and  fine  taste,  he  read  with  great  spirit  and  true  efi'ect. 
This  marvellous  child  taught  himself,  by  the  age  of 
four  or  five,  to  read  and  to  write — learning  to  read 
by  Avhole  sentences,  and  not  by  letters  or  syllables, 
and  to  write  by  copying  print,  "as  other  children  draw 
dogs  and  horses."  This  is  no  family  legend,  since  we 
have  in  the  Autobiography  a  dated  facsimile  of  the 
child's  composition  at  the  age  of  seven,  ^dth  a  drawing 


10  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

of  a  mountain  road.  The  passage  is  a  long  description 
of  a  cloud  which,  by  his  "electrical  apparatus,"  the 
boy  Harry  proves  to  be  charged  with  positive  elec- 
tricity, and  he  illustrates  this  by  an  allusion  to  the 
witch  of  the  Alps  standing  in  the  rainbow  in  Manfred. 
It  is  rare  to  have  such  formal  evidence  of  precocity  in 
childhood,  showing  correct  spelling  and  skilful  writing, 
literary  expression,  scientific  interest,  and  exact  observa- 
tion of  nature.  We  need  not  wonder  if  the  parents  of 
this  enfant  de  miracle  thought  themselves  blessed  by 
Heaven  with  an  infant  Samuel. 

Prceterita  afibrds  us  a  real  piece  of  psychology,  as 
it  minutely  describes  how  the  child  would  gaze  on  the 
pattern  of  a  carpet,  count  the  bricks  on  a  wall,  wonder 
at  the  eddies  of  the  Tay,  "clear-brown  over  the 
pebbles,"  or  would  watch  the  sea-waves  hour  by  hour, 
or  "the  rivulets  in  which  the  sand  danced  and  minnows 
darted  above  the  springs  of  Wandel."  Though  born 
in  London,  the  child  at  the  age  of  four  was  moved 
with  the  family  to  Heme  Hill,  "a  rustic  eminence" 
a  few  miles  south  of  the  city.  Thence  there  was  a 
view  of  the  Norwood  Hills,  of  Harrow  and  Windsor. 
From  his  earliest  days,  he  was  taken  by  his  father  in 
his  annual  drives  on  business  to  the  north  of  England, 
and  even  to  the  Lakes  and  to  Scotland,  where  he  usually 
stayed  Math  his  aunt  and  cousins  in  Perth.  In  their 
driving  tours,  to  visit  customers  and  collect  orders  for 
sherry,  the  elder  Euskin,  who  had  a  cultivated  taste 
in  art,  took  the  party  to  visit  castles,  cathedrals,  ruined 
abbeys,  colleges,  parks,  country  mansions,  and  picture 
galleries,  in  which  the  boy,  full  of  Scott's  romances  and 
passionately  fond  of  landscapes,  nursed  his  chivalrous 
fancies,  and  drank  in  beauty  at  every  step.     The  child 


I.]  BIRTH  AND  CHILDHOOD  11 

"lisped  in"  Modern  Painters  from  his  Scotch  nurse's 
arms. 

At  the  age  of  four  he  was  painted  by  Northcote, 
E.A.  The  picture  of  a  chubby  child  in  white  frock 
with  blue  sash  now  hangs  in  the  dining-room  at  Brant- 
wood.  His  mother's  birch  discipline  had  taught  him 
to  sit  quite  still ;  and  when  the  painter,  pleased  by  his 
patience,  asked  what  he  would  like  as  a  background, 
he  replied,  "Blue  hills" — the  hills  he  had  seen  from 
Perth — of  which  old  Anne  used  to  sing — 

"  Her  barefooted  lassies  and  mountaiiis  so  blue." 

Even  before  that  age  he  preached  a  sermon :  "  People 
be  dood.  If  you  are  dood,  Dod  will  love  you ;  if  you 
are  not  dood,  Dod  will  not  love  you.  People  be  dood." 
His  first  letter  bears  a  postmark  which  shows  that  it 
was  written  when  he  was  just  turned  four.  It  is 
correct  and  natural.  He  complains  that  his  uncle  and 
aunt  put  up  the  pillars  of  his  new  box  of  bricks  "up- 
side down.  Instead  of  a  book  bring  me  a  whip, 
coloured  red  and  black.  To-morrow  is  Sabbath — I 
would  like  you  to  come  home.  My  kiss  and  my  love  " ; 
and  so  on.  In  all  these  reminiscences  and  relics  we 
may  see  indications  of  that  indefatigable  love  of  nature 
and  of  art,  of  mountains  and  rivers — the  born  evan- 
gelist and  hot-gospeller,  the  positive  critic  with  his 
rationale  of  building,  and  the  literary  lash  of  brilliant 
device — Calvinism,  self-will,  and  deep  affection.  Verily 
the  child  is  father  of  the  man ! 

At  the  age  of  seven  he  began  to  compose  original 
pieces,  with  illustrations  of  his  own.  "Harry  and 
Lucy  concluded — being  the  last  Part  of  Early  Lessons 
in  four  volumes — vol.  i.,  with  copper  plates  printed 


12  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

and  composed  by  a  little  boy,  and  also  drawn  " — such 
is  the  ambitious,  characteristic,  veracious  title-page  of 
this  work,  of  which  but  one  part  and  a  quarter  was 
completed.  From  the  age  of  seven  he  began  to  write 
poems,  a  practice  which  he  kept  up  constantly  till  he 
left  Oxford  ;  and  at  nine  he  composed  a  poem  entitled 
''Eudosia:  a  Poem  on  the  Universe."  It  was  in  that 
stage  that  he  began  to  lead,  he  tells  us,  "a  very  small, 
perky,  contented,  conceited  Cock-Robinson-Crusoe  sort 
of  life,  in  the  central  point  which  it  appeared  to  me 
that  I  occupied  in  the  universe."  Such  was  the  very 
natural  result  to  a  child  of  genius,  nursed,  stimulated, 
petted,  and  isolated  from  the  world  outside. 

In  a  passage  of  curious  and  pathetic  introspection, 
the  author  himself  analyses  the  good  and  evil  of  the 
system  on  which  he  was  brought  up — "the  maternal 
installation"  of  his  mind.  At  the  age  of  seven,  he 
says,  he  had  been  irrevocably  impressed  with  a  perfect 
understanding  of  three  priceless  gifts — Peace,  Obedi- 
ence, and  Faith.  To  these  moral  lessons  he  adds  the 
habit  of  fixed  attention  in  eyes  and  in  mind,  and  an 
extreme  delicacy  of  the  bodily  senses,  due  to  strict 
home  discipline.  But  these  good  things  were  mixed 
with  severe  "calamities."  First,  he  had  nothing  to 
love.  His  parents  were  no  more  loved  than  the  sun 
and  the  moon ;  they  were  visible  powers  of  nature  to 
him."  Nor  did  he  love  God.  He  had  no  companions, 
no  one  to  assist  or  to  thank.  Secondly,  he  had  nothing 
to  endure :  no  danger,  no  pain  was  suffered  to  come 
near  him ;  "  his  strength  was  not  exercised,  his  patience 
never  tried,  and  his  courage  never  fortified."  Thirdly, 
he  was  taught  no  manners ;  shyness  grew  on  him ;  he 
obtained  no  skill  in  any  accomplishment,  nor  ease  and 


I.]  BIRTH  AND  CHILDHOOD  13 

tact  in  behaviour.  Lastly  and  chief  of  evils,  his  judo-, 
ment  was  left  undeveloped — "  the  bridle  and  blinkers 
were  never  taken  off  him."  It  is  a  true,  if  slightly 
overdrawn,  sketch,  most  melancholy  to  read — how  a 
child,  marvellously  sensitive  and  preternaturally  pre- 
cocious, was  nursed  and  swaddled,  and  isolated  from 
the  buffets  of  the  outside  world  and  from  society  with 
human  beings,  and  almost  forced  by  parental  affection 
and  authority  to  regard  its  little  self  as  a  sublime 
genius  destined  to  reform,  inform,  and  direct  the 
world.  And  withal,  this  nursing  and  this  detachment 
created  the  daring  critic  and  the  impassioned  priest 
of  pure  Nature  and  man's  highest  good.  His  mother, 
he  tells  us,  like  Hannah,  "had  devoted  him  to  God 
before  he  was  born." 

No  method  of  life  could  have  been  devised  so  favour- 
able to  bring  out  close  attention  to  natural  objects,  the 
cultivation  of  original  ideas,  and  practical  study  of 
literature.  The  baby  spent  his  first  summers  in  the 
country,  was  left  to  toddle  about  in  a  garden,  and 
in  his  fourth  year  was  taken  to  Scotland,  of  course  by 
road.  There  he  used  to  play  in  a  garden  leading 
down  to  the  Tay ;  or  again  in  Surrey,  on  the  banks  of 
Wandel.  He  saw  as  an  infant,  he  says,  all  the  high- 
roads and  most  of  the  cross-roads  in  England  and 
Wales,  and  as  far  as  Perth,  and  nearly  all  the  noble- 
men's houses  in  England.  What  powers  of  imagination 
he  possessed,  he  says,  either  fastened  themselves  on 
inanimate  things  or  soared  into  regions  of  romance. 
He  could  remember  no  time  in  his  life  when  the  novels 
of  Walter  Scott  were  not  familiar  to  him.  He  had 
hardly  any  books  to  read  except  the  Bible  and  Pope's 
Homer,  Scott,  and  the  great  poets.     Much  of  his  time 


14  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

was  taken  up  in  the  watching  of  the  ways  of  plants, 
or  in  poring  over  minerals  and  specimens  of  rocks. 
"By  the  swirls  of  smooth  blackness,  broken  by  no 
fleck  of  foam,  where  Tay  gathereth  herself  like  Medusa, 
I  never  passed  without  awe,"  he  writes.  He  learned 
to  copy  drawings  as  a  child.  But  he  could  never  draw 
anything  "out  of  his  head" — without  a  copy.  And 
he  always  declares  that  he  never  could  compose  any 
drawing  of  any  kind. 

From  the  age  of  seven  he  was  constantly  occupied 
in  original  composition.  He  made  a  systematic  diary 
of  his  tours,  and  as  often  as  not  these  experiences  were 
thrown  into  verse.  Thousands  of  such  lines  are  extant, 
portions  of  which  may  be  seen  in  the  two  volumes  of 
Poems.  At  the  age  of  ten  (May  1829)  he  presented 
his  father  with  an  original  work  of  his  own — "Battle 
of  Waterloo:  A  Play  in  two  Acts,  with  other  small 
Poems."  Wellington  and  Bonaparte  perorate,  and  a 
chorus  describes  the  procession  of  triumph.  Com- 
paring the  Pyramids  with  Skiddaw,  he  ^vrites — 

"  The  touch  of  man 
Raised  pigmy  mountains,  but  gigantic  tombs. 
The  touch  of  Nature  raised  the  mountain's  brow.'' 

A  boy  who  could  write  and  think  like  that  when 
he  was  ten  was  fully  qualified  to  profit  by  the  con- 
tinual joiu-neys  on  which  he  was  taken.  In  reading  his 
own  memoirs  and  the  story  of  his  family,  it  seems  as  if 
their  lives  were  passed  in  perpetual  travelling.  Not  only 
was  the  boy  taken  every  year  long  journeys  in  a  pos1> 
chaise  on  the  business  visits  to  every  part  of  England, 
but  even  to  the  Continent.  At  five  he  was  taken  to 
Keswick.  At  six  to  Paris,  Brussels,  and  Waterloo. 
At  seven  again  to   Perthshire.     At  fourteen  he  was 


1.]  BIRTH  AND  CHILDHOOD       '^dUfi^^  15 

taken  through  Flanders,  along  the  Ehine,  through  the 
Black  Forest  to  Switzerland.  It  was  then  that  he 
first  drank  in  his  life-long  passion  for  the  Alps.  He 
describes,  in  a  delightful  episode  in  Frceterita,  his  first 
sight  of  the  Alps  from  Schafi"hausen.  His  youth,  in 
fact,  was  one  constant  tour  in  search  of  beautiful  scenes 
and  romantic  spots.  His  love  of  Nature  was  developed 
far  earlier  than  his  love  of  art;  and  through  life  it 
remained  to  him  a  far  deeper  joy  and  a  more  congenial 
study.  His  interest  in  the  great  Italian  art  came  to 
him  indeed  curiously  late,  and  in  somewhat  doubtful 
ways.  And  to  the  last  he  speaks  of  his  own  under- 
standing of  Italian  art,  whether  painting,  sculpoure,  or 
architecture,  with  somewhat  less  of  that  pride  and 
sureness  which  mark  his  sense  of  Nature's  beauty  and 
her  mysteries. 

A  boy  so  precocious  and  sensitive,  who  was  saturated 
with  the  love  of  Nature,  and  also  with  the  master- 
pieces in  poetry  and  prose,  needed  no  pedagogic  direc- 
tion. And,  as  is  usual  in  such  cases,  what  pedagogic 
instruction  he  had  was,  perhaps,  rather  a  hindrance 
than  a  help.  At  the  age  of  eleven  he  was  taught 
some  Latin,  and  less  Greek,  by  Dr.  Andrews,  a  genial 
but  somewhat  desultory  scholar,  who  never  "grounded" 
the  incorrigible  lad  as  he  might  have  been  grounded  at 
a  regular  school.  Mr.  Runciman  was  engaged  as  his 
drawing-master,  who,  at  any  rate,  taught  him  perspec- 
tive. At  twelve  the  boy  was  taught  a  little  French 
and  some  useful  geometry  by  Mr.  Eowbotham,  of 
whom  the  young  genius  wearied  as  a  dull  and  plodding 
pedagogue.  At  fifteen  the  boy  was  sent  to  the  day- 
school  of  the  Eeverend  Thomas  Dale  at  Peckham. 
Here  he  was  in  a  rather  broken  course  for  two  years, 


16  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

at  the  end  of  which  time  he  was  pronounced  "shaky" 
in  scholarship.  He  also  attended  lectures  at  King's 
College,  London,  for  three  days  a  week  in  logic, 
English  literature,  and  translation.  At  the  age  of 
seventeen  he  was  matriculated  at  Oxford;  and  as  it 
was  doubtful  if  he  could  pass  the  ordinary  examina- 
tion, he  was  allowed  to  enter  Christ  Church  as  a 
gentleman-commoner. 

No  doubt  can  remain  that  when  John  went  to 
Oxford  at  the  age  of  eighteen,  his  school  teaching  had 
been  desultory,  and  his  schoolboy  knowledge  was  poor. 
He  assures  us  that  he  never  learned  to  write  Latin 
prose,  and  with  difficulty  managed  the  regulation 
Latin  verse.  He  knew  the  elements  of  Euclid  well, 
and  some  algebra.  He  had  read  little  in  the  ancient 
classics,  and  had  but  a  smattering  of  French.  On  the 
other  hand,  he  had  taught  himself  and  had  picked  up 
a  good  deal  of  general  knowledge  in  elementary 
physics,  and  had  passionately  devoted  himself  to 
geology,  botany,  and  minerals,  in  his  own  way.  He 
had  worked  at  museums  and  made  collections  of 
his  own,  which  he  carefully  catalogued.  Besides 
this,  he  had  seen  at  eighteen  more  of  England  and  of 
the  Continent  than  most  systematic  tourists,  and  had 
observed  and  thought  about  all  this  perhaps  more 
than  any  living  man.  He  had,  no  doubt,  written 
more  prose  and  verse  than  has  been  recorded  of  any 
man  of  his  years;  and  he  had  made  himself  an  in- 
defatigable student  of  composition,  an  art  which 
from  infancy  he  had  practised  A^dth  zeal  and  untiring 
patience. 

With  much  nervous  energy  and  a  lively  temper,  the 
young  John  was  delicate,  and  his  parents  behaved  as 


I.]  BIRTH  AND  CHILDHOOD  17 

if  his  life  could  only  be  saved  by  unremitting  care. 
The  family  records  are  perpetually  interrupted  by 
illness.  At  eight  he  had  a  serious  attack  of  fever  in 
Scotland.  At  sixteen  he  was  in  great  danger  for 
some  days  with  pleurisy,  and  had  to  be  taken  away 
from  Mr.  Dale's  school.  At  twenty-one  he  was 
attacked  with  spitting  of  blood,  and  had  to  be  re- 
moved from  Oxford  for  a  whole  year  and  a  half.  But 
he  was  no  permanent  invalid ;  in  health,  a  very  good 
walker,  full  of  activity  and  high  spirits,  and  always  an 
ardent  worker,  whose  eyes  and  pen  seldom  ceased  night 
or  day.  But  he  learned  no  boyish  games,  never 
attempted  to  dance,  and  after  repeated  efforts  at  a 
riding  school  could  not  be  taught  to  sit  a  horse. 

We  need  not  take  quite  literally  all  the  confessions 
in  Frceterifa;  but  there  can  be  little  doubt  that  the 
young  Euskin  had  been  brought  up  in  an  abnormal 
way  in  a  family  which  practised  a  sort  of  igdisme-a-trois, 
as  if  it  were  a  law  of  God  and  man.  He  himself  calls 
it  "our  regular  and  sweetl}^  selfish  manner  of  living." 
Again,  "It  was  at  once  too  formal  and  too  luxurious." 
He  says  he  was  "a  conceited  and  troublesome  little 
monkey" — "he  was  safe  against  ridicule  in  his  con- 
ceit." In  these  Confessions  of  his,  which  in  all  their 
literary  charm  and  in  their  pure  simplicity  may  be 
contrasted  with  those  of  Eousseau — and  they  are 
nearly  as  frank  and  outspoken — we  see  how  the  old 
man  could  judge  severely  the  errors  of  his  youth,  and 
even  analyse  the  foibles  and  mistakes  of  his  parents. 
But  we  must  not  forget  all  the  evidence  he  accumulates 
of  the  indulgent  fondness  of  his  father  and  the  iron 
devotion  of  his  mother,  all  his  own  tenderness  of 
affection,  wherever  love  was  open  to  him.     Nor  must 

B 


18  JOHN  RUSKIN"  [chap.  i. 

we  forget  that  conceit  was  almost  inevitable  to  one  ef 
such  marvellous  precocity,  having  so  many  of  the 
rarest  gifts  of  sense  and  of  brain,  morbidly  imprisoned 
in  a  very  small  circle,  where  he  was  treated  almost  as 
if  he  were  a  being  of  another  order  with  a  direct 
mandate  from  on  high.  And  this  desultory  education, 
with  incessant  touring  and  indefatigable  description 
of  all  he  saw,  was  the  ideal  method  by  which  was 
produced  the  evangelist  of  Nature  and  Art  and  the 
consummate  master  of  language,  whilst  it  made  it 
impossible  that  he  should  become  either  a  consistent 
thinker  or  a  rational  reformer  of  the  modern  world. 


CHAPTER   11 

FIRST  LITERARY  EFFORTS 

It  is  time  to  give  some  connected  account  of  the 
young  Ruskin's  pieces  earlier  than  the  first  volume  of 
Modern  Painters  whicli  appeared  in  1843  (when  he  was 
twenty-four).  He  wrote  both  prose  and  verse  almost 
from  the  nursery.  But  as  his  early  poetry  surpasses 
in  quantity  and  in  merit  his  earliest  prose,  and  as  he 
ceased  to  write  verses  on  leaving  Oxford,  it  will  be 
best  to  begin  with  the  poetry.  Poetry,  in  the  true 
and  high  sense  of  the  term,  as  we  apply  it  to  Shelley, 
or  Tennyson,  or  Arnold,  John  Ruskin  never  did  achieve. 
In  the  two  volumes  which  contain  selected  pieces,  and 
where  we  may  see  some  fourteen  thousand  lines,  it 
would  be  difficult  to  find  a  single  poem,  perhaps  even  a 
stanza,  that  rises  above  very  good  work  of  the  "minor 
poet."  One  striking  fact  is  that  almost  all  the  poems 
are  descriptions  of  scenery  and  places,  which  hardly 
any  one  but  Byron  has  ever  made  interesting.  Another 
curious  fact  is  that  the  early  poems  are  the  most 
spontaneous  and  the  best,  the  very  early  ones  amazing 
in  their  precocious  facility.  A  third  point  is  that  they 
display  no  quality  of  Ruskin's  individual  mind  and 
literary  power.  The  rhythm  is  correct,  easy,  and 
cultivated;  the  form  taken  from  the  best  models; 
the  phrasing  pure,  graceful,  and  picturesque ;  and  yet 


20  JOHN  RUSKIN  (chap. 

tlie  poem  as  a  piece  leaves  no  definite  impression  on 
the  mind.  Thought  is  overborne  in  clouds  of  refined 
language;  poetry  exhales  in  exuberant  local  colour. 
And  yet  as  a  study  of  literary  evolution,  the  two 
volumes  of  poetry  cannot  be  neglected. 

Authentic  fragments  of  the  child's  verses  have  been 
preserved  from  the  age  of  seven.  Even  at  that  age, 
when  few  children  can  write  or  spell,  there  are  bits 
which  are  perfectly  correct  in  rhythm  and  phrase,  and 
invariably  accurate  rhymes.  Of  a  steam-engine  em- 
ployed in  a  mine  he  says — 

"  When  furious  up  from  mines  the  water  pours, 
And  clears  from  rusty  moisture  all  the  ores." 

He  corrects  (at  seven)  the  ignorant  people  who  cannot 
enumerate  the  colours  of  the  rainbow — 

"  But  those  that  do  not  know  about  that  light 
Reflect  not  on  it ;  and  in  all  that  light 
Not  one  of  all  the  colours  do  they  know." 

The  infant  John  could,  at  seven,  patter  oflf  the  colours 
in  their  right  order ! 

Again  he  apostrophises  a  Scotch  glen — in  a  strain  of 
Wordsworthian  moralising  on  the  analogies  of  mountain 
scenery  and  human  life — 

'*  Glen  of  Glenfarg,  thy  beauteous  rill, 

Streaming  through  thy  mountains  high, 
Onward  pressing,  onward  still, 
Hardly  seeing  the  blue  sky. 

"  Mountain  streams,  press  on  your  way, 
And  run  into  the  stream  below  : 
Kever  stop  like  idle  clay, — • 
Hear  the  sheep  and  cattle  low." 


11.]  FIRST  LITERARY  EFFORTS  21 

A  babe  who  thought  and  wrote  like  this  at  seven 
seemed  destined  either  for  a  premature  death  or 
immortality  on  earth. 

Of  Glenfarg,  at  the  age  of  eight,  he  writes— 

"  Those  dropping  Avaters  that  come  from  the  rocks, 
And  many  a  hole,  like  the  haunt  of  a  fox  ; 
That  silvery  stream  that  runs  babbling  along, 
Making  a  murmuring,  dancing  song." 

At  nine  this  miraculous  infant  thus  addressed  Skid- 
daw  : — 

"  Skiddaw,  upon  thy  heights  the  sun  shines  bright, 
But  only  for  a  moment ;  then  gives  place 
Unto  a  playful  cloud  which  on  thy  brow 
Sports  wantonly, — then  floats  away  in  air, — 
Throwing  its  shadow  on  thy  towering  height ; 
And,  darkening  for  a  moment  thy  green  side, 
But  adds  unto  its  beauty,  as  it  makes 
The  sun  more  bright  when  it  again  appears. 
Thus  in  the  morning  on  thy  brow  these  clouds 
Rest  as  upon  a  couch,  and  give  vain  scope 
For  fancy's  play.     And  airy  fortresses. 
And  towers,  and  battlements,  and  all  appear 
Chasing  the  others  off,  and  in  theur  turn 
Are  chased  by  the  others. 

save  where  the  snow 
(The  fleecy  locks  of  winter)  falls  around 
And  forms  a  white  tomb  for  the  careless  swain 
Who  wanders  far  from  home,  and  meets  his  death 
Amidst  the  cold  of  winter." 

We  might  pick  out  of  the  Excursion  many  a  duller 
passage  than  this ;  and  it  would  not  be  easy  to  pick  a 
single  passage  that  would  show  the  same  precise 
and  minute  watching  of  the  clouds  on  a  mountain,  as 


22  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

vnth  the  eye  of  the  painter — the  same  pictorial  dis- 
tinctness. 

There  is  nothing  better  in  the  two  volumes  of  poetry 
than  this  piece  on  Skiddaw  composed  at  the  age  of 
nine.  The  marvel  is  that  at  ten  or  twelve  ("The 
Fairies";  "The  Eternal  Hills,"  1831)  the  boy  Johnny 
wrote  poetry  entirely  equal  to  good  average  University 
prize  poems ;  with  that  tedious  facility,  the  imitative 
trick,  the  correct  and  measured  rhythm  which  mark 
that  form  of  composition.  He  could  copy  Pope,  Scott, 
Byron,  AVordsworth — even  Shelley — as  well  as  a  good 
oleograph  can  'copy  an  original  Turner.  There  is 
hardly  a  fault  in  metre,  a  crudity,  an  extravagance,  or 
a  cacophony  in  all  these  boy's  exercises.  He  never 
did  any  better — even  at  sixty.  And  the  verses  show 
nothing  of  his  power  except  the  keen  observation  of 
nature  and  the  delicate  feeling;  but  none  of  the  exu- 
berance, passion,  eloquence  of  his  prose  writing  from  the 
first.  Why  a  grand  but  tempestuous  master  of  prose 
for  twelve  years  continued  to  indite  whole  volumes  of 
mellifluous  but  rather  commonplace  verse  must  always 
rank  as  one  of  the  curiosities  of  literature. 

Many  a  prize  poem  has  had  worse  couplets  in  the 
Papist  vein  than  these  on  Etna — 

"  Then  Etna  from  his  burning  crater  pours 
A  fiery  torrent  o'er  Sicilia's  shores. 
While,  from  the  crater,  gaseous  vapours  rise  ; 
Volcanic  lightnings  flash  along  the  skies  ; 
Earth  gapes  again  ;  Catania's  city  falls, 
And  all  her  people  die  within  her  walls." 

This  is  dated  25th  October  1829  {aetat.  10). 
At  the  age  of  twelve  he  wrote  The  Iteriad — a  long 
poem  in  three  books,  a  versified  journal  of  a  tour  in 


II.]  FIRST  LITERARY  EFFORTS  23 

tke  Lakes,      Six  or  seven  hundred   lines    have  been 
printed,  of  which  the  following  is  a  specimen : — 

"  Where  the  pikes  of  Sea-fell  rose  so  haughty  and  proud, 
While  its  battlements  lofty  looked  down  on  the  cloud, — 
WTiile  its  sides  with  ravines  and  dark  chasms  were  riven, — 
That  huge  mountain- wall  seemed  upholding  the  heaven  ! " 

He  had  now  begun  to  read  Byron,  and  was  caught  with 
the  ring  of  the  Hours  of  Idleness. 

At  the  age  of  fourteen  (May  1833)  he  wrote  a  verse 
diary  of  a  tour  on  the  Continent  from  Calais  to  Genoa. 
Twenty-eight  of  these  pieces  have  been  published. 
They  are  in  imitation  of  Scott's  Lady  of  the  Lake. 
Some  of  them  were  published  in  Friendship's  Offering, 
and  were  quite  as  good  as  the  pieces  usually  printed 
in  that  annual.     At  St.  Goar  on  the  Ehine  he  says — 

"  No  marvel  that  the  spell-bound  Rhine, 
Like  giant  overcome  with  wine, 
Should  here  relax  his  angry  frown, 
And,  soothed  to  slumber,  lay  him  down 
Amid  the  vine-clad  banks  that  lave 
Their  tresses  in  his  placid  wave." 

There  are  many  tamer  bits  ia  Tlie  Lay  of  the  Last 
Minstrel. 

At  sixteen  he  versified  his  diary  of  a  tour  through 
France  to  Chamouni,  1835,  which  he  tells  us  was  "in 
the  style  of  Don  Juan,  artfully  combined  with  that 
of  Childe  HarokV — wherein  the  imitation  of  the 
second  was  more  successful  than  that  of  the  first — 
though  the  Byronic  rhymes  are  not  bad;  e.g.  "the 
place  where  old  Tom  Becket  is  "  rhymes  to  "  similar 
antiquities." 

At  seventeen  his  first  love  affair  inspires  not  a  few 


24  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

pieces,  but  it  adds  nothing  either  to  the  vigour  or 
merit  of  his  poems.  The  verses  "To  Adele"  hardly 
rise  above  the  level  of  average  amatory  poems.  The 
three  long  poems  written  for  the  Newdigate  Prize  at 
Oxford,  1837,  1838,  1839,  at  the  age  of  eighteen,  nine- 
teen, and  twenty,  are  all  simply  very  good  academic 
exercises  quite  up  to  the  best  Oxford  standard.  In 
his  first  trial  he  was  beaten  by  Dean  Stanley ;  but  in 
1839  he  won  the  prize  with  "Salsette  and  Elephanta." 
This  piece  may  perhaps  rank  with  the  first  class  of 
the  Newdigates,  and  it  is  an  almost  servile  imitation 
of  that  ancient  type  : — 

"  'Tis  eve,  and  o'er  the  face  of  parting  day 
Quick  smiles  of  summer  lightning  flit  and  play  : 
In  pulses  of  broad  light,  less  seen  than  felt. 
They  mix  in  heaven,  and  on  the  mountains  melt  ]  -' 

and  so  on  and  so  on — 

"  O'er  thy  dark  sands,  majestic  Dharavee  ; — 
And  pause  above  Canarah's  haunted  steep  ; — 
The  Indian  maiden,  through  the  scented  grove 
Seeks  the  dim  shore,  and  lights  the  lamp  of  love." 

After  that,  of  course,  breezes  stir  the  peepul's  sacred 
shade.  Presently  we  are  introduced  to  Brahma's 
painless  brow — and  Veeshnu's  guardian  smile.  And 
at  last  India  is  converted.     She 

"  Deserts  the  darkened  path  her  fathers  trod. 
And  seeks  redemption  from  the  Incarnate  God." 

All  this  is  strictly  in  accordance  with  the  programme 
of  a  prize  poem  which  Goldwin  Smith  is  said  to  have 
given  a  friend,  whose  subject  was  "The  Stuarts" — 
"  The  Stuarts  will  never  be  restored — The  Jews  will — 


II.]  FIRST  LITERARY  EFFORTS  25 

Salem ! "  The  other  pieces  written  in  the  Oxfoixi 
period,  some  of  which  were  published  at  the  time,  are 
quite  on  the  level  of  good  occasional  poetry,  but  are 
nothing  more.  And  as  they  were  composed  by  an 
adult  at  an  age  when  many  cultivated  men  have  written 
poetry  as  good,  they  have  no  special  interest  or  value. 
They  are  graceful,  correct,  melodious  pieces ;  but  they 
fail  to  rouse  us,  they  have  no  real  distinction,  no 
strong  grip.  They  do  not  even  interest  us,  as  the 
boyish  effusions  do  from  their  precocious  maturity. 

To  turn  now  to  the  earliest  prose.  He  wrote  clearly 
and  spelled  correctly  in  1823,  at  the  age  of  four.  From 
the  age  of  seven  he  wrote  up  his  diary  regularly,  with 
accurate  descriptions  of  the  places  he  visited.  In 
"  Harry  and  Lucy  "  he  writes  thus  :  "  Harry  ran  for  an 
electrical  apparatus  which  his  father  had  given  him, 
and  the  cloud  electrified  his  apparatus  positively. 
After  that  another  cloud  came  which  electrified  his 
apparatus  negatively,  and  then  a  long  train  of  smaller 
ones."  All  this  is  spelled  accurately,  and  is  written 
in  printed  letters ;  and  in  the  same  book  are  given  a 
multitude  of  observations  of  physical  phenomena.  At 
the  age  of  thirteen  he  wroto  letters  which  are  per- 
fectly correct,  easy,  and  lowing. 

His  first  printed  pieces  appeared,  when  he  was 
fifteen,  in  Loudon's  Magazine  of  Natural  History^  1834. 
This  contained  an  essay  on  the  geologic  strata  of  Mont 
Blanc,  a  Note  on  the  perforation  of  a  leaden  pipe  by 
rats,  and  inquiries  into  the  causes  of  the  colour  of 
Ehine- water.  In  1835  the  annual  Friendship's  Offering, 
published  by  Smith,  Elder  and  Company,  printed  three 
of  his  poems  on  German  scenes.     Loudon's  Magazine 


26  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

also  published,  in  1836,  essays  of  his  on  "The  In- 
duration of  Sandstone "  and  "  Observations  on  the 
Temperature  of  Spring  and  Eiver  Water."  When 
Blackwood^ s  Magazine,  in  1836,  made  an  attack  on 
Turner's  pictures  of  the  year,  the  young  art  critic 
dashed  off  an  answer  in  defence  of  the  painter.  The 
essay  was  not  sent  direct  to  the  editor  of  Blackwood, 
but  was  submitted  to  Turner  himself,  who  expressed 
his  own  contempt  of  the  critics,  and  sent  the  essay, 
not  to  the  Magazine,  but  to  the  purchaser  of  his  picture 
— the  subject  of  which  is  "Juliet  at  Venice." 

The  piece  has  been  preserved  in  manuscript;  and 
it  is  so  entirely  Ruskinian  in  its  enthusiasm,  its  love 
of  nature,  and  also  in  its  redundancies,  is  so  truly  a 
fore-word  to  Modern  Painters,  being  dated  at  his  age 
of  seventeen,  that  a  bit  of  it  deserves  to  be  quoted : — 

"  His  imagination  is  Shakespearian  in  its  mightiness.  .  .  . 
Many-coloured  mists  are  floating  above  the  distant  city  ;  but 
Buch  mists  as  you  might  imagine  to  be  ethereal  spirits,  souls 
of  the  mighty  dead  breathed  out  of  the  tombs  of  Italy  into 
the  blue  of  her  bright  heaven,  and  wandering  in  vague  and 
infinite  glory  around  the  earth  that  they  have  loved.  Instinct 
with  the  beauty  of  uncertain  light,  they  move  and  mingle 
among  the  pale  stars,  and  rise  up  into  the  brightness  of  the 
illimitable  heaven,  whose  soft,  sad  blue  eye  gazes  down  into 
the  deep  waters  of  the  sea  for  ever — that  sea  whose  motionless 
and  silent  transparency  is  beaming  with  phosphor  light,  that 
emanates  out  of  its  sapphire  serenity  like  bright  dreams 
breathed  into  the  spirit  of  a  deep  sleep.  And  the  spires  of 
the  glorious  city  rise  indistinctly  bright  into  those  living  mists 
like  pyramids  of  pale  fire  from  some  vast  altar  ;  and  amidst 
the  glory  of  the  dream  there  is,  as  it  were,  the  voice  of  a 
multitude  entering  by  the  eye,  arising  from  the  stillness  of 
the  city  like  the  summer  wind  passing  over  the  leaves  of  the 
forest  when  a  murmur  is  heard  amidst  their  multitudes." 


II.]  FIRST  LITERARY  EFFORTS  27 

All  this  is  certainly  trop  de  choses — too  full  of  imasjes, 
clouds,  glories,  and  serenities  which  tumble  over  each 
other,  and  read  too  much  like  a  vulgar  parody  of  those 
purp^irei  panni  of  the  Seven  Lamjis  that  the  author  so 
bitterly  regretted.  But  one  sees  how,  seven  years  later, 
all  this  might  become  the  germ  of  Modern  Painters. 
In  1837,  at  the  age  of  eighteen,  he  contributed  a  series 
of  papers  to  Loudon's  Architectural  Magazine.  These 
were  entitled  "The  Poetry  of  Architecture;  or  the 
Architecture  of  the  Nations  of  Europe  considered  in 
its  Association  with  Natural  Scenery  and  National 
Character."  As  he  wrote  afterwards:  "I  could  not 
have  put  in  fewer,  or  more  inclusive  words,  the  defini- 
tion of  what  half  my  future  life  was  to  be  spent  in 
discoursing  of ;  while  the  nom  de  plume  I  chose,  '  Accord- 
ing to  Nature,'  was  equally  expressive  of  the  temper 
in  which  I  was  to  discourse  alike  on  that  and  every 
other  subject."  The  papers  were  signed  "  Kata  Phusin." 
"These  youthful  essays,"  he  adds,  "though  deformed 
by  assumption,  and  shallow  in  contents,  are  curiously 
right  up  to  the  points  they  reach."  They  contained 
a  good  deal  of  classical  allusion,  and  were  believed  to 
be  written  by  an  Oxford  don. 

The  following  year  (1838)  he  engaged  in  a  contro- 
versy on  "  The  Convergence  of  Perpendiculars "  in 
painting — on  which  he  wrote  five  papers  in  answer  to 
Mr.  Parsey.  Mr.  Arthur  Parsey  had  attempted  by 
optics  to  upset  the  conventional  scheme  of  perspective. 
"Kata  Phusin"  replied  that  in  practice  the  field  of 
vision  in  a  picture  is  so  limited  that  the  geometric 
aberration  may  be  disregarded.  The  young  critic's 
knowledge  of  Optics  was  not  quite  sufficient  to 
enable  him  to  master  the  whole  truth;   but  he  Avas 


28  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

right  in  defending  the  current  practice  as  that 
which  the  human  eye  appears  to  see  in  the  given 
position. 

About  the  same  time  Euskin  wrote  a  long  essay  for 
a  young  lady  on  "The  Comparative  Advantages  of  the 
Studies  of  Music  and  Painting,"  wherein  he  places 
painting  above  music  as  a  means  of  education,  though 
he  gives  to  music  a  greater  power  of  stirring  emotion ; 
but,  curiously  •  enough,  he  adds  that  its  power  is 
strongest  in  proportion  as  the  art  is  diminished. 

A  remarkable  proof  of  the  effect  on  public  opinion 
being  wrought  by  the  first  appearance  of  the  young 
critic  was  afforded  when  the  Edinburgh  committee 
were  considering  the  form  of  the  Scott  Memorial.  A 
writer  in  the  Architectural  Magazine  asked  for  the 
opinion  of  "Kata  Phusin"  as  one  of  considerable 
importance.  So  challenged,  "Kata  Phusin"  replied 
in  a  paper  in  the  Magazine  (January  1839) :  "  Whether 
Works  of  Art  may,  with  propriety,  be  combined  with 
the  sublimity  of  Nature ;  and  what  would  be  the  most 
appropriate  situation  for  the  proposed  Monument  to 
the  Memory  of  Sir  Walter  Scott  in  Edinburgh." 
After  much  inquiry,  he  rather  prefers  a  colossal 
monument  of  Scott  to  be  placed  on  Salisbury  Crags. 
The  committee  did  not  adopt  his  yiqw,  and  perhaps 
Auld  Reekie  would  not  have  been  pleased  if  they 
had. 

During  this  discussion  the  publisher  Loudon  him- 
self wrote  to  the  father  this  remarkable  and  prophetic 
passage  (November  30,  1838):  "Your  son  is  certainly 
the  greatest  natural  genius  that  ever  it  has  been  my 
fortune  to  become  acquainted  with ;  and  I  cannot  but 
feel  proud  to  think  that  at  some  future  period,  when 


II.]  FIRST  LITERARY  EFFORTS  29 

both  you  and  I  are  under  the  turf,  it  will  be  stated  in  the 
literary  history  of  your  son's  life  that  the  first  article 
of  his  which  was  published  was  in  Loudon's  Magazine 
of  Natural  History.''^ 

Would  that  every  young  genius  of  nineteen  could 
find  a  publisher  so  generous  and  so  full  of  insight ! 


CHAPTEE   III 

LOVE — OXFORD — TURNER 

Naturally,  the  romantic  young  poet  of  seventeen  fell 
in  love.  In  the  year  1836  M.  Domecq  brought  his 
four  younger  daughters  to  England  to  stay  with  the 
Ruskins  at  Heme  Hill.  They  lived  in  good  society  in 
Paris,  and  all  eventually  married  into  French  families 
of  title.  John  fell  deeply  in  love  with  Adele,  the 
eldest  of  the  four,  then  fifteen,  an  elegant,  gay,  and 
beautiful  girl.  He  has  himself  told  us  the  story  with 
infinite  grace  and  pathos.  The  four  beautiful  girls — 
an  apparition  of  fairydom  to  the  raw  "  conven1>bred " 
lad,  as  he  calls  himself,  reduced  him  to  a  heap  of 
white  ashes  in  four  days.  "But  the  Mercredi  des 
Cendres  lasted  four  years,"  and  darkened  his  early  life. 
Clotilde,  he  says,  as  her  sisters  called  her,  but  Adele 
to  him,  because  this  rhymed  to  shell,  spell,  and  knell, 

"  was  only  made  more  resplendent  by  the  circlet  of  her  sisters' 
beauty  ;  while  my  own  shyness  and  unpresentableness  were 
further  stiffened,  or  rather  sanded,  by  a  patriotic  and  Protes- 
tant conceit  which  was  tempered  neither  by  politeness  nor 
sympathy ;  so  that,  while  in  company  I  sate  jealously  miser- 
able like  a  stock  fish  (in  truth,  I  imagine,  looking  like  nothing 
so  much  as  a  skate  in  an  aquarium  trying  to  get  up  the 
glass),  on  any  blessed  occasion  of  Ute-a-Ute,  I  endeavoured  to 
entertain  my  Spanish-born,  Paris-bred,  and  Catholic-hearted 
SO 


CHAP.  III.]  LOVE— OXFORD-TURNER  31 

mistress  with  my  own  views  upon  the  subjects  of  the  Spanish 
Armada,  the  Battle  of  Waterloo,  and  the  doctrine  of  Transub- 
stantiation." 

So,  after  fifty  years,  the  lady  being  long  married 
and  dead,  the  old  lover  can  recount  his  feelings ;  but  it 
is  certain  that  they  were  very  real  at  the  time  and 
deeply  influenced  his  health  and  his  career.  The  two 
fathers  quite  contemplated  marriage — which  Mrs. 
Ruskin,  as  a  severe  Calvinist,  looked  on  as  horrible  and 
impossible.  The  boy,  of  course,  resorted  to  poetry.  He 
began  -wdth  "Leoni:  A  Romance  of  Italy,"  a  story  of 
Naples,  where  the  bandit  Leoni  represents  some  san- 
guinary and  adventurous  being,  and  Giuletta  the  per- 
fections of  his  mistress.  It  was  even  printed  in 
Friendshij)^s  Offering,  and  is  a  curiously  clever  imitation 
of  Byron — 

"  I  do  not  ask  a  tear  ;  but  while 
I  linger  where  I  must  not  stay, 
Oh  !  give  me  but  a  parting  smile. 
To  light  me  on  my  lonely  way." 

Adele  not  only  smiled,  but  "laughed  over  it  in  rippling 
ecstasies  of  derision,  of  which  I  bore  the  pain  bravely, 
for  the  sake  of  seeing  her  thoroughly  amused."  Yes; 
it  was  the  old  story,  when  calf  seventeen  woos  lambkin 
fifteen,  as  a  greater  poet  than  Johnny  Ruskin  knew. 
Then  followed  love  poems,  very  good  average  pieces 
for  a  young  poet,  only  remarkable  for  their  precocious 
grace  and  polish,  with  even  occasional  touches  of  in- 
spiration as  this.  Adele  has  gone,  and  is  spoken  of  in 
his  hearing : — 

"  Thy  gentle  name  doth  rend  apart 
The  clouds  of  the  forgetful  veil, 
That  dims  the  heaven  of  my  heart." 


/<^ 


t 


32  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

Then  lie  tried  a  romantic  tale,  Velasquez,  the  Novice, 
and  a  play,  MarcoUni — a  compound  of  Shakespeare  and 
Byron — -the  scene  Venice,  the  heroine  an  amalgam  of 
Desdemona  and  Juliet,  and  the  young  Marcolini  *'  such 
a  man  as  angels  love  to  look  upon  ! " 

"  All  dazzled  by  the  light  of  his  own  love, 
To  see  strange  things  i'  the  world. 
Such  as — benevolence  in  misanthropes, 
Mercy  in  bravoes,  justice  in  senators, 
And  other  such  things  incompatible  ! " 

But  his  young  Helena  would  not  see  all  these 
amiabilities  in  our  Heme  Hill  Marcolini.  She 
even  "laughed  immensely"  over  a  letter  in  French 
in  seven  quarto  pages  which  he  Avrote  to  her  in 
Paris  about  the  solitudes  of  Heme  Hill  since  she  left 
it.  Two  years  later,  she  was  then  seventeen,  and  John 
was  nineteen,  he  saw  her  again  in  England ;  but  she 
still  laughed  at  him.  M.  Domecq  died,  and  Adele  was 
engaged  to  the  Baron  Duquesne,  a  handsome  and  rich 
young  noble.  John  wrote  "Farewell,"  a  long  and  very 
graceful  poem  in  the  vein  of  Shelley,  which  told 

"  The  grief  my  \Yords  were  weak  to  tell. 
And  thine  unable  to  console." 

It  is  a  touching  piece  from  the  circumstances,  and  only 
just  misses  being  a  fine  poem,  by  its  perfection  of  grace 
and  smoothness ;  and  it  is  "without  a  touch  of  repining, 
or  bitterness,  or  even  surprise.  In  a  dream  he  sees 
how  her  smile  wakes  the  night-flowers  at  her  feet — 

"  It  fell  on  the  cold  rocks,  and  on  the  free 
Unfeeling  waves, — oh  !  wherefore  not  on  me  ?  " 

This  comes  very  near  indeed  to  poetry. 


III.]  LOVE— OXFORD— TURNER  53 

Adele  married  Baron  Duquesne  in  March  1840. 
They  tried  to  keep  the  news  from  the  lover,  as  he  was 
now  preparing  for  his  degree  at  Oxford.  He  declares 
(fifty  years  later)  that  the  news  did  not  crush  him  so 
much  as  he  had  expected.  But  his  health  seemed  to 
belie  this  assertion,  for  he  was  startled  with  indications 
of  consumption.  "Things  were  progressing  smoothly 
in  Paris,  to  the  abyss  "  (i.e.  to  the  marriage  of  Adele 
Domecq),  when  one  night  a  short  cough  brought  blood 
into  the  mouth.  Consultations  of  doctors  ended  in  his 
being  ordered  abroad ;  the  Dean  postponed  his  degree, 
the  wine-merchant  left  his  business,  and  the  whole 
party  crossed  the  Continent  and  wintered  in  Eome. 
For  nearly  two  years  John  was  an  invalid,  aimlessly 
roving  from  place  to  place,  and  with  mind  as  little 
settled  to  any  definite  point  as  was  his  body.  The 
Duquesne  marriage  turned  out  happily.  The  Domecq 
family  were  all  brought  up  to  love  and  admire  Ruskin's 
works,  and  to  the  last  spoke  of  him  with  kindness. 
"Men  capable  of  the  highest  imaginative  passion,"  he 
writes  in  1885,  "are  always  tossed  on  fiery  waves  by 
it."  And  he  consigns  the  memory  of  his  "  absurdity, 
pain,  error,  wasted  aff'ection,"  to  the  dust-heap  of 
Oblivion.  So  be  it !  But  with  him  we  may  wonder 
"  what  sort  of  a  creature  he  would  have  turned  out  if 
Love  had  been  with  him  instead  of  against  him." 
i  Quien  sabe  ? 

Our  author  has  told  the  story  of  his  Oxford  career 
with  the  same  delightful  naivete,  though  we  need  not 
take  too  literally  all  the  humours  and  confessions  of 
Prceterita.  His  father,  con\anced  that  his  son  was 
destined  to  be  a  bishop,  quite  resolved  to  put  him  in 
the   best  position,   in   the   best   college,   in   the  best 

o 


34  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

university  according  to  his  own  lights.  And  with  all 
his  prudence  and  good  sense,  such  was  the  rigid  aloof- 
ness of  the  whole  Ruskinian  world  and  its  methods, 
that  John  James  would  often  take  a  course  both 
singular  and  unwise.  Having  resolved  to  enter  his  son 
at  Christ  Church,  the  old  wine-merchant  was  so  ill 
advised  as  to  make  the  raw,  shy  lad  a  gentleman- 
commoner,  where  he  was  thrown  into  the  immediate 
companionship  of  men  of  rank,  wealth,  and  fashion. 
These  young  lords  and  squires  who  rode  races,  betted, 
shirked  all  work  and  got  into  scrapes,  naturally  re- 
garded the  queer  poet  as  a  butt  rather  than  an  equal. 
One  of  the  sur\avors  of  their  table  in  1840  tells  me 
that  Ruskin  was  one  of  the  gentlest  creatures  ever  seen 
in  Oxford,  more  like  a  girl  than  a  man,  who  was  looked 
on  as  a  joke  until  a  few  men  perceived  his  genius  and 
the  rest  became  aware  of  his  goodness.  His  fine 
temper,  his  wit,  his  mastery  of  drawing,  his  skill  in 
chess,  his  hospitality,  and  superb  sherry,  won  over  the 
young  "  bloods,"  who  at  last  agreed  to  regard  him  as 
something  quite  of  an  order  by  himself.  And  before 
long  he  was  admitted  to  the  society  of  the  best  men  of 
the  college. 

There  he  made  the  life-long  friendship  with  (Sir) 
Henry  Acland  and  (Dean)  Liddell,  (Sir)  Charles 
Newton  and  Dr.  Buckland,  with  whom  he  studied 
geology.  His  college  tutors  were  the  Eev.  W.  Brown 
and  Osborne  Gordon.  At  Dr.  Buckland's  he  met  Dr. 
Daubeny  and  Charles  Darwin.  "He  and  I  got  on 
together  and  talked  all  the  evening."  He  was  called 
up  to  read  an  essay  in  Hall,  which  he  did  with  great 
effect,  to  the  scandal  of  the  gentleman-commoners  who 
shirked  essays  and  got  their  tasks  done  at  Is,  6d.  a 


111.]  LOVE— OXFORD— TURNER  35 

sheet.  On  the  third  trial  he  won  the  Newdigate  Verse 
Prize,  with  a  poem  which  has  been  already  described. 
It  was  the  one  University  honour  for  which  he 
seriously  strove,  and  which  he  was  proud  to  win.  The 
House  was  pleased  at  his  success;  and  even  Dean 
Gaisford,  the  academic  Bluebeard  of  the  time,  con- 
descended to  coach  him  in  the  parts  of  his  poem  which 
he  should  recite  in  the  theatre.  Those  who  care  to  see 
how  a  clever  man  may  beat  a  man  of  genius  may  com- 
pare Dean  Stanley's  "  Gipsies  "  with  Ruskin's.  Stanley 
was  no  more  a  poet  than  was  Huskin,  and  had  not  a 
tenth  part  of  Ruskin's  poetic  spirit.  But  Stanley  had 
the  journalist's /air  for  hitting  the  taste  of  the  day  and 
appealing  to  the  sentiments  of  his  readers  instead  of 
expatiating  on  his  own. 

One  of  the  most  amazing  episodes  of  this  girl- 
undergraduate  life  was  the  resolution  of  his  mother 
to  come  up  to  lodge  in  Oxford  during  term  and 
to  have  John  every  evening  to  tea  with  her — the 
deserted  father  and  husband  coming  up  solemnly  (by 
road  of  course)  to  spend  Sunday.  Marvellous  to  tell, 
neither  John,  nor  his  father,  nor  the  College,  nor  the 
undergraduates,  saw  anything  unusual  in  this  proceed- 
ing, and  he  declares  that  it  was  not  a  source  of  chaff. 
But  the  whole  story  of  his  Oxford  life  must  be  read 
in  his  own  Prceterita,  with  its  inimitable  irony  and 
waggery,  and  we  must  read  cum  grano  his  gentle  play 
about  his  friends  and  himself. 

John  was  examined  for  Little-go  by  Robert  Lowe, 
who  was  "very  kind."  In  fact,  he  worked  steadily  at 
the  subjects  of  his  course,  though  he  came  up  feeling 
for  them  "  not  the  slightest  interest."  It  is  clear  that 
he  read  "  his  books  "  with  care,  and  that  his  elementary 


36  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

geometry  was  thoroughly  good.  In  the  end,  after  the 
terrible  breakdown  of  his  health,  which  sent  him  away 
from  Oxford  for  a  year  and  a  half  (1840-41),  he  did  so 
well  in  his-Final  Examination  that  he  received  an  honor- 
ary fourth  class  both  in  Classics  and  in  Mathematics. 
A  double  honorary  Fourth  means  that  a  man  who  seeks 
only  the  ordinary  degree  has  the  unsolicited  honour 
conferred  on  him  by  the  examiners  in  both  schools. 
It  is  extremely  rare,  and  it  used  to  be  said  that  it  was 
equivalent  to  a  Double  First-class.  It  was  the  charac- 
ter of  Euskin  to  work  thoroughly  at  everything  he 
took  in  hand.  To  know  "  every  syllable  of  his  Thucy- 
dides,"  as  he  declares  he  did,  was  indeed  scholarship 
in  itself. 

The  sojourn  of  Mrs.  Euskin  at  Oxford,  of  which 
we  are  told  the  sole  object  was  to  watch  over  John's 
health,  was  in  some  sense  justified  when  one  night,  in 
the  spring  of  1840,  he  was  attacked  with  hemorrhage 
of  the  lungs,  went  round  to  his  mother,  who  took  him 
to  London  to  consult  physicians,  and  no  doubt  saved 
his  life  by  insisting  on  the  rest  and  foreign  travel  they 
ordered.  The  journey  to  Italy,  except  that  he  there 
made  the  acquaintance  of  Joseph  Severn  and  George 
Eichmond,  did  him  little  good,  either  physically  or 
morally;  and  he  was  at  last  restored  by  a  summer 
among  the  Alps  and  the  dietary  treatment  at  Leam- 
ington by  Dr.  Jephson.  One  of  the  most  singular  of 
the  records  in  Frceterita  is  the  languid  interest  he  took 
in  the  first  sight  of  Italy,  even  of  Florence,  Siena,  and 
Eome,  where  neither  history,  art,  nor  romance  at  all 
impressed  him.  No  doubt  his  bad  health  affected  his 
mental  interests.  On  his  recovery  he  worked  hard 
with  Osborne   Gordon,  passed  his   examination  with 


III.]  LOVE— OXFORD— TURNER  37 

great  credit,  and  received  the  degree  of  B.A.  in  May 
1842. 

It  is  difficult  to  estimate  the  value  of  Oxford  to 
Ruskin.  In  his  violently  ironical  way  he  says,  "The 
whole  time  I  was  there,  my  mind  was  simply  in  the 
state  of  a  squash  before  it  is  a  peascod,"  and  he  speaks 
of  his  academic  attainments  with  amused  contempt. 
Oxford  in  the  end  deeply  interested  him,  and  as  pro- 
fessor called  forth  some  of  his  most  ardent  labours. 
After  all,  perhaps  the  Thucydides  and  the  geometry 
were  the  most  thorough  bits  of  systematic  study  on 
regular  lines  that  Ruskin  ever  made  in  his  life.  On 
the  other  hand,  the  curriculum  then  current,  not  ex- 
cluding the  Newdigate,  the  Latin  prose,  and  the  Greek 
syntax,  drew  him  off  at  a  critical  time  from  his  natural 
bent,  and,  along  with  love,  wasted  some  of  his  best 
years.  Ruskin  was  bound  in  any  case  to  be  miscel- 
laneous in  his  impressions  and  desultory  in  his  eager- 
ness. Perhaps  Oxford  would  have  been  to  him  a 
school  of  unmixed  good  if  he  had  been  able  to  form 
his  own  occupations  and  his  own  friendships  apart 
from  any  degree  work;  if  his  fond  parents  had  not 
expected  him  to  win  the  highest  honours  and  ultimately 
to  blossom  into  a  full-blown  Bishop  of  the  Church. 

In  a  striking,  perhaps  morbid,  passage  in  Prceterita 
he  records  his  feelings  on  finding  himself  at  last 
through  his  Oxford  course,  with  his  powers  in  embryo, 
likings  indulged  rather  against  conscience,  "and  a  dim 
sense  of  duty  to  myself,  my  parents,  and  a  daily  more 
vague  shadow  of  Eternal  Law."  It  is  the  usual  lot  of 
genius  at  twenty-two  or  three.  At  any  rate,  he  gave 
up  all  idea  of  becoming  a  bishop,  to  thje  lasting  grief 


38  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

of  his  parents,  and  he  flatly  declined  to  enter  the 
sherry  trade.  In  a  hazy  way  he  now  saw  that  his 
mission  was  to  be  a  prose  poet  of  Nature  and  of  Art. 
And  the  outcome  was,  as  usual,  a  journey  of  the  whole 
family  to  the  Alps  again.  He  was  prose  poet  of 
Nature  first  and  foremost.  Art  came  later,  and  was 
subordinate  always.  "  Clouds  and  mountains  have 
been  life  to  me,"  he  says.  "The  essential  love  of 
Nature  in  me,"  he  adds,  was  the  root  of  all  he  had 
become  and  the  light  of  all  he  had  learned.  No  one, 
he  thinks,  can  have  had  such  rapture  as  he  has  known 
from  the  mere  sight  of  mountains.  "They  did  not 
haunt  me  'like  a  passion.'  They  were  a  passion." 
Two  mountains  he  names  "have  had  enormous  in- 
fluence on  his  whole  life."  The  child  of  four  who 
asked  for  "blue  mountains"  to  his  portrait,  who  at 
seven  apostrophised  Skiddaw,  who  on  his  first  view 
of  the  Alps  from  SchafFhausen  could  feel  his  "destiny 
fixed  in  all  of  it  that  was  to  be  sacred  and  useful,"^ 
who  at  twenty-three  had  spent  the  best  part  of  his  life 
in  studying  nature,  was  inevitably  destined  to  become 
the  apostle  of  beautiful  scenery  to  an  age  which  Byron 
and  Wordsworth  had  attuned  to  this  passion,  and  to 
judge  what  painting  had  done  to  make  us  understand 
Nature. 

Euskin  began  to  draw  as  a  child,  but  always  to  copy 
to  make  a  record  of  things  he  saw  before  him.     At 


1  The  present  writer  remembers  his  own  first  view  of  the 
Alps  from  Schaffhausen  at  the  end  of  a  hard  day;  and  after 
some  forty  visits  to  the  Alps  cannot  forget  the  emotion  he 
felt  at  the  sudden  sight,  nor  can  he  ever  see  the  eternal  snows 
without  a  choking  sensation  in  the  throat.  There  is  no  home- 
sickness, no  patriotism,  like  that  of  the  mountaineer. 


ni.]  LOVE— OXFORD— TURNER  39 

ten  he  could  copy  Cruikshank's  illustrations;  but  he 
never  could  compose  an  original  design.  In  1832, 
when  thirteen,  he  made  a  successful  drawing  of  Dul- 
wich  bridge,  and  was  presented  with  a  copy  of  Hogers's 
Italy,  "  which  determined  the  main  tenor  of  my  life." 
The  vignettes  by  Turner  filled  him  with  delight,  and 
he  set  himself  to  imitate  them  as  far  as  he  could.  As 
a  boy  Kunciman  was  his  first  drawing-master ;  and  in 
his  sixteenth  year  he  was  promoted  to  study  with 
Copley  Fielding.  At  twenty-two  he  had  lessons  from 
Harding.  At  this  time,  just  before  taking  his  degree, 
he  had  drawn  a  bit  of  ivy  round  a  thorn  stem  at  Nor- 
wood, and  this  he  often  refers  to  as  a  revelation  to 
him  that  exact  truth  and  close  acceptance  of  Nature 
was  the  basis  of  all  real  art. 

When  Turner,  in  Eogers's  Italy,  first  burst  on  the 
sight  of  the  boy  Ruskin  at  the  age  of  thirteen,  like 
his  first  view  of  the  Alps  from  Schaffhausen,  he  had 
never  heard  of  the  master,  except  that  Runciman  told 
him  how  "the  world  had  been  dazzled  by  some  splendid 
ideas  of  the  painter."     In  his  seventeenth  year  Ruskin 
was  roused  to  indignation,  as  we  have  seen,  by  Black-"^ 
wood's  attack  on  Turner  as  "out  of  nature,"  and  the^ 
furious  diatribe  which  he  wrote  in  defence  has  only* 
turned  up  since  his  death,  for  it  has  never  been  printed.  , 
"The  review,"  he  says,  "raised  me  to  the  height  of; 
'  black  anger,'  in  which  I  have  remained  pretty  nearly 
ever  since."     In  Prceterita,  Ruskin  calls  this  essay  "  the 
first  chapter  of  Modern  Painters:'     In  1837  his  father 
bought  him  his  first  Turner— the  "  Richmond,  Surrey," 
which   they  both  triumphed   over  as   having  "trees, 
architecture,    water,    a    lovely    sky,    and    a    clustered 
bouquet  of  brilliant  figures."      The  second  Turner  in 


40  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap.  hi. 

1839  was  the  "Gosport."  On  his  twenty-first  birth- 
day for  his  rooms  at  Christ  Church  his  father  gave 
him  the  "  Winchelsea.''  And  he  afterwards  bought 
the  "  Slave  Ship,"  "  Harlech,"  and  other  pieces  of  the 
master.  These  were  "the  chief  recreation  of  my 
fatigued  hours."  He  had  been,  from  his  earliest  recol- 
lections, a  student  of  the  Turners  collected  by  Mr. 
Windus  at  Tottenham.  This  generous  and  admirable 
amateur  (whom  the  present  writer  well  remembers  as 
a  most  courteous  host)  bought  up  all  the  drawings 
Turner  made  for  the  engravers,  and  gave  Ruskin  the 
run  of  his  rooms  at  any  time.  "He  was  the  means 
of  my  "svriting  Modern  Painters." 

At  last  came  "what  the  reader  might  suppose  a 
principal  event  of  my  life" — John  Ruskin  was  intro- 
duced to  "  the  man  who  beyond  all  doubt  is  the  greatest 
of  the  age" — the  words  are  in  the  Diary  under  date 
12th  June  1840:— 

"  I  found  him  a  somewhat  eccentric,  keen-mannered,  matter- 
of-fact,  English-minded  gentleman  ;  good-natured  e^^ddently, 
bad-tempered  evidently,  hating  humbug  of  all  sorts,  shrewd, 
perhaps  a  little  selfish,  highly  intellectual,  the  powers  of  the 
mind  not  brought  out  with  any  delight  in  their  manifestation, 
or  intention  of  display,  but  flashing  out  occasionally  in  a  vrord 
or  a  look." 

Such  was  the  way  in  which  the  undergraduate  of 
twenty-one  judged  the  great  painter  whom  he  was 
about  a  year  or  two  later  to  expound,  to  interpret, 
to  belaud,  and  to  immortalise  in  burning  words  to  a 
dazzled  but  somewhat  puzzled  world. 


CHAPTEK   IV 

MODERN  PAINTERS 

We  have  now  reached  the  opening  of  young  Ruskin's 
career  as  an  Apostle  of  Nature  and  Art,  with  that 
book  which,  in  spite  of  his  own  disclaimers  and  many 
strong  reasons  to  the  contrary,  the  world  has  agreed  to 
regard  as  his  central  and  typical  work.  His  mission 
was  to  preach  the  aesthetic  study  of  Nature  and  to 
justify  Turner  as  the  chief  interpreter  of  the  new 
Nature- Worship.  As  soon  as  he  returned  from  what 
seems  to  have  been  his  fifth  visit  to  the  Alps,  and  had 
put  on  his  bachelor's  gown  at  Oxford,  he  settled  down 
at  home  in  Heme  Hill  to  write  his  Modern  Painters  in 
the  autumn  and  winter  of  1842,  he  being  then  twenty- 
three.  Each  piece  when  finished  was  read  aloud  to  the 
father  and  mother  and  cousin  Mary,  and  would  even 
draw  tears  of  joy  from  the  doting  parents.  It  was  the 
moment  when  the  first  portrait  by  George  Richmond, 
R.A.,  was  made — the  young  poet  seated  at  a  desk  with 
pencil  in  hand,  Mont  Blanc  in  the  background — the 
expression  charged  with  pensive  sensibility  and  in- 
spiration. These  were  perhaps  the  critical  hours  of  his 
life,  imdoubtedly  the  happiest  and  most  unclouded. 

Brimful  of  the  Alps,  of  the  mountains,  lakes,  castles, 
and  churches  of  the  Rhine,  Switzerland,  and  Italy, 
Cumberland,  and  Perthshire,  the  personal   friend  of 

41 


42  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

Turner,  the  possessor  of  some  of  his  best  pieces,  the 
pupil  of  Copley  Fielding  and  Harding,  the  honorary 
class-man  of  Oxford  and  prize  poet,  he  now  fell  with 
zeal  to  enlarge  his  Blackwood  pleading  for  Turner,  and 
his  "  Kata  Phusin  "  dogmas  of  the  following  of  Nature's 
law.  But,  first,  the  true  dogmas  had  to  be  expounded 
and  old  dogmas  revised.  And,  nothing  loth  or  timid, 
the  student  of  Plato,  Aristotle,  Euclid,  and  Aldrich 
proceeded  to  lay  down  principles  of  Art,  and  right 
expression  of  natural  fact,  in  a  series  of  trenchant  pro- 
positions, regardless  of  venerable  axioms  and  popular 
commonplace.  The  dominant  idea  of  his  trumpet  call 
to  painters  was  to  fling  aside  the  traditions  of  the 
Academies,  to  go  humbly  to  Nature,  rejecting  nothing, 
selecting  nothing,  scorning  nothing.  It  was  quite 
obvious  that  Canaletto,  Poussin,  and  Claude  did  no- 
thing of  the  kind  ;  and  they  were  blind  leaders  of  the 
blind.  Our  modern  (English)  painters — and  the  lad 
certainly  knew  nothing  of  those  abroad — did  look  hard 
at  the  facts  of  Nature,  and  drew  what  they  saw ;  such 
men  as  Prout,  C.  Fielding,  Harding,  Cox,  though  each 
in  a  limited  way  for  certain  classes  of  facts;  but 
Turner  had  given  all  the  facts — trees,  rivers,  sea, 
clouds,  mountains,  details,  colour,  and  impression — but 
all  transfigured  with  his  own  poetry  of  magical  sight. 

This  doctrine — in  the  main  a  true  doctrine,  which  in 
substance  has  prevailed  and  holds  the  field  —  was 
asserted  and  reasserted  with  a  militant  confidence,  of 
which  only  an  Oxford  prizeman  who  has  just  become 
B.A.  is  the  past  master,  and  with  a  subtlety,  imagina- 
tion, and  passion  of  which  no  other  man  then  living 
was  capable.  All  this  was  infused  with  reminiscences 
of  Greek   philosophy;    of   Aristotle's  warning  to  be 


IV.]  MODERN  PAINTERS  43 

certain  only  of  what  we  know  by  proof  :  of  Plato's  war 
against  the  false  knowledge  of  the  sophists  and  their 
love  of  fine  phrases  instead  of  evidence;  of  Bacon's 
revolt  against  the  schoolmen ;  and  Locke's  repudiation 
of  traditional  "authority"; — and  it  was  set  forth  with 
a  splendour  of  declamation  and  a  torrent  of  illustration, 
with  word-pictures  and  word-scourges,  such  as  had 
never  yet  been  dreamed  of  in  the  stolid  commonplaces 
of  conventional  criticism.  There  was  something  in  it 
of  Eousseau  bursting  in  with  his  appeal  to  Nature 
against  the  Ancient  Regimen;  something  of  John 
Wesley's  appeal  to  the  Spirit  of  Jesus  against  a  pluralist 
Church ;  and  even  more  of  the  cry  of  "  Sartor  "  in  his 
wrath  against  shams  and  falsehoods,  but  with  the  un- 
couth sarcasms  of  the  mighty  Tailor  replaced  by 
gorgeous  records  of  foreign  travel,  and  symphonies 
rehearsed  in  most  majestic  descant. 

The  book  was  finished  in  the  winter,  and  was  pub- 
lished in  May  1843.  The  intended  title  of  it  was  to 
be  "  Turner  and  the  Ancients."  But,  by  the  advice  of 
the  publishers'  reader,  this  was  changed  to  the  title 
which  the  original  volume  bore — "  Modern  Painters  : 
their  Superiority  in  the  Art  of  Landscape  Painting  to 
all  the  Ancient  Masters  proved  by  Examples  of  the 
True,  the  Beautiful,  and  the  Intellectual,  from  the 
Works  of  Modern  Artists,  especially  from  those  of 
J.  M.  W.  Turner,  Esq.,  E.A."  Such  was  the  eminently 
veracious  and  characteristic  sub-title  of  the  book, 
exactly  expressing  the  scope  of  volume  i. ;  all  the  dog- 
matism, self-confidence,  fighting,  and  chivalrous  temper 
of  the  new  gospel.  As  it  was  thought,  especially  by 
the  wary  father,  likely  to  be  regarded  as  presumptuous 
in  a  young  man  of  twenty-four,  the  author's  name  was 


44  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

suppressed,  and  the  book  was  signed  by  "  A  Graduate 
of  Oxford."  In  spite  of  this  economy  of  strict  truth  in 
literature,  the  young  knight,  with  his  coat-of-arms 
veiled  in  mystery,  hung  forth  his  challenge  to  defend 
his  Master  against  all  comers  in  the  lists  of  Art  before 
the  judges  of  Beauty  and  Truth  in  the  presentation  of 
Nature. 

The  appearance  of  volume  i.  of  Modern  Painters 
produced  a  real  sensation  in  the  artistic,  and  even  in 
the  literary  world.  The  recognised  organs  of  criticism 
were  hostile  and  contemptuous.  The  painters  whom 
he  had  criticised  and  praised  were  not  all  satisfied  with 
qualified  eulogium;  and  Turner  was  rather  over- 
whelmed by  the  zeal  of  his  young  friend.  There  was 
much  in  the  outspoken  heresy  of  the  youthful  re- 
former to  scandalise  the  connoisseur,  the  veteran 
artist,  the  hack  writer,  and  the  Bible  literalist.  But 
men  of  insight  saw  in  it  a  new  idea.  The  poet  Rogers, 
to  whom  John  Ruskin  had  been  presented  as  a  boy, 
and  who  asked  him  to  his  famous  breakfast  parties, 
allowed  the  book  to  lie  on  his  table.  Tennyson,  who 
saw  Nature  so  often  in  kindred  ways^  begged  for  the 
book.  Sydney  Smith,  as  we  have  seen,  recognised  its 
power.  Sir  Henry  Taylor  thought  it  more  deeply 
founded  than  any  other  that  he  knew.  Poets  were  the 
first  to  call  into  their  company  the  prose  poet  of 
Nature  who  had  placed  the  lasting  crown  on  the  head 
of  the  colour-poet  of  Nature. 

The  world  of  culture,  as  its  way  is,  soon  caught  hold 
of  a  new  man ;  and  the  Oxford  graduate  was  received 
in  society  and  met  at  dinner  tables.  The  delighted 
father  had  no  scruple  now  in  divulging  the  author's 
name.     He  bought  for  his  son  Turner's  "  Slave  Ship," 


IV.]  MODEEX  PAINTERS  45 

a  picture  of  tremendous  power  and  almost  ghastly 
realism,  which  long  hung  on  the  dining-room  wall. 
The  family  had  now  left  the  Heme  Hill  house  for  a 
more  spacious  abode  at  Denmark  Hill.  The  present 
writer  remembers  it  as  an  ample  country  house  of  good 
proportions  standing  in  its  own  grounds  of  some  seven 
acres,  with  carriage  drive,  gardens,  shrubbery,  paddock, 
and  small  farm,  an  airy  and  charming  site,  the  walls  of 
the  rooms  covered  mth  choice  specimens  of  Turner's 
drawings.  The  family  lived  there  until  the  death  of 
old  Mrs.  Euskin  in  1871,  and  often  dispensed  a  hearty 
hospitality,  ever  rejoiced  to  show  the  treasures  of  the 
place — no  less  than  thirty  Turners,  half-a-dozen  Hunts, 
a  Tintoretto,  the  collection  of  minerals ;  apples,  peaches 
— "pigs  especially,  highly  educated,  who  spoke  ex- 
cellent Irish." 

The  father,  now  wholly  converted  to  Turner,  and 
become  one  of  his  regular  purchasers,  was  eager  to 
have  Modern  Painters  continued.  It  was  to  enlarge  on 
the  principle  of  Truth  and  to  give  ample  illustrations 
of  mountains,  foliage,  and  clouds.  And  so,  after  the 
father's  birthday  in  ^lay  1844,  the  whole  family  started 
for  Switzerland  for  the  sixth  time.  There  John  studied 
Mont  Blanc,  its  glaciers  and  aiguilles,  under  the  care 
of  Couttet,  the  famous  guide ;  drew  the  forms  of  both 
with  marvellous  precision  and  force — uniting  for  once 
the  geologist,  the  mountaineer,  and  the  artist — for  he 
understood  the  anatomy  of  rocks  better  than  any 
painter,  and  could  di^aw  as  no  geologist  or  mountaineer 
could  do.  "  Many  and  many  an  hour  of  precious  time 
and  perfect  sight  was  spent  during  these  years  in  thus 
watching  skies  .  .  .  much  was  learned,  which  is  of  no 
use  now  to  anybody ;  for  to  me  it  is  only  a  sorrowful 


46  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

memory,  and  to  others  an  old  man's  fantasy"  {Prm- 
ierita,  ii.  94,  1886). 

There  he  met  Professor  Forbes,  studied  glacier  forms 
Avith  him,  and  became  an  ardent  supporter  of  the 
"  viscous  "  theory.  Thence  on  to  the  Italian  lakes  and 
the  Simplon  Pass,  where  he  made  drawings  and  still  more 
delicious  diaries  of  natural  forms  and  landscapes.  He 
visited  the  Bel  Alp  and  Zermatt,  and  wondered  at  the 
Matterhorn  and  the  Weisshorn,  which  seemed  to  him 
inferior  to  Mont  Blanc.  And  so  home  by  Paris,  which 
he  was  now  sufficiently  cured  "to  bear  the  sight  of 
again,"  and  visited  the  Louvre.  And  here  he  found  a 
great  change  come  over  the  spirit  of  his  art  dream. 
He  saw  much  in  ancient  Italian  art  to  which  he  had 
hitherto  been  indifferent.  He  wonders,  and  we  may 
wonder,  how  such  a  man  could  be,  at  twenty-five,  so 
ignorant  of  early  Italian  painting ;  indeed,  so  callous, 
for  at  the  age  of  twenty-two  he  had  seen  Milan,  Pisa, 
Florence,  Venice,  and  Rome.  But  in  the  summer  of 
1844,  all  at  once,  he  tells  us,  he  saw  all  the  greatness 
of  Titian,  of  Veronese,  Bellini,  and  Perugino.  He 
found,  in  fact,  that  what  the  graduate  of  Oxford  had 
pored  over  so  intently  for  ten  years  was  but  a  single 
comer  of  the  world  of  art ;  that  very  great  men  had 
Hved  long  before  Turner,  and  had  other  ideals  besides 
those  of  Turner ;  nay,  that  the  author  of  a  new  Gospel 
of  art  should  know  something  of  the  history  of  art — 
and  even  the  history  of  man — wherein  our  graduate 
was  still  but  a  tiro.  In  short,  the  defence  of  Turner 
and  the  Moderns  must  be  enlarged,  and  the  Ancients 
must  be  studied  anew. 

The  autumn  and  winter  of  1844  was  given  to  study, 
mainly  of  mediaeval  history  and  art,  to  Eio  and  Lord 


IV.]  MODERN  PAINTERS  47 

Lindsay;  and  it  seemed  essential  before  continuing 
Modern  Painters  to  work  at  Pisa  and  Florence. 
Accordingly,  in  April  1845,  he  started  abroad,  for  the 
first  time  without  his  parents,  but  with  George,  his 
vaJet,  and  Couttet,  his  Chamouni  guide.  Some  lines 
written  at  Geneva  on  Mont  Blanc  in  a  deeply  religious 
strain  convinced  him  that  he  could  say  nothing  rightly 
in  verse,  and  (no  doubt  wisely)  he  renounced  poetry 
for  ever.  Lucca  seems  first  to  have  opened  his  eyes 
to  the  power  of  building,  and  the  tomb  of  Ilaria  di 
Caretto  became  "a  supreme  guide  to  him  ever  after." 
He  now  had  books,  and  pored  over  Dante,  in  Gary's 
translation,  Sismondi's  Italian  Bepublics,  and  Lord 
Lindsay's  Christian  Art.  Pisa  and  the  Campo  Santo — 
where  he  saw  "the  entire  doctrine  of  Christianity 
painted  so  that  a  child  could  understand  it " — deepened 
his  enthusiasm  for  mediaeval  art.  He  drank  in  the 
whole  Gospel  in  these  frescoes,  "  straight  to  its  purpose, 
in  the  clearest  and  most  eager  way."  Here  at  Pisa, 
with  the  Spina  Chapel,  he  saw  the  school  of  his  Italian 
studies  fixed  for  many  years,  as  he  sat  drawing  with 
intense  zeal  from  six  in  the  morning  till  four  in  the 
afternoon. 

From  Pisa  to  Florence,  where  he  flung  himself  into 
monasteries  and  chapels,  at  Santa  Maria  Novella, 
Santa  Croce,  and  San  Marco,  absorbed  in  Angelico  and 
Ghirlandajo— "Lippi  and  Botticelli  were  still  far  be- 
yond him  " — or  strolling  up  after  dinner  to  Fesole  or 
San  Miniato.  At  Florence  his  work  was  "thinking 
and  writing."  Thence  he  went  north  to  Macugnaga 
under  Monte  Rosa— where,  oddly  enough,  he  found 
little  to  interest  him,  except  in  reading,  for  the  first 
time  seriously,  Shakespeare's  lioman  plays  j  and  as  to 


48  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

Val  Anzasca,  it  had  no  interesting  features  !  Such 
was  his  "desultory,  but  careful,  reading,  which  began 
in  his  mossy  cell  at  Macugnaga."  Thence  he  took  the 
St.  Gothard  route  to  Faido  and  Dazio  Grande,  and  did 
the  work  which  is  one  of  the  gems  of  Modern  Painters, 
vol.  iii.  At  Baveno  he  was  joined  by  Harding,  and 
they  toured  about  the  lakes  and  to  Verona — "no 
happier  epoch  than  it  was  to  both."  We  are  told 
that  "though  Eouen,  Geneva,  and  Pisa  have  been  the 
centres  of  thought  and  teaching  to  me,  Verona  has 
given  the  colouring  to  all  they  taught."  He  went  on 
to  Venice  for  Harding's  sake,  where  for  a  week  they 
lounged  about  the  markets  and  the  boats,  looking  for 
effects  of  light  on  city  and  on  sea.  But  in  a  spare 
hour  they  dropped  into  the  Scuola  di  San  Rocco.  There, 
of  a  sudden,  Tintoretto  revealed  himself,  and  largely 
determined  the  current  of  Ruskin's  future  life. 

There  have  been  recorded  (mainly  by  himself)  a 
good  many  casual  incidents  which  determined  the 
bent  of  his  life — the  gift  of  Rogers's  Italy,  the  first 
sight  of  the  Alps,  a  bit  of  ivy  round  a  thorn,  the  tomb 
of  Ilaria,  the  Campo  Santo,  Mont  Blanc,  a  Veronese  in 
the  Louvre — but  this  first  -vdsion  of  the  Tintorettos 
of  St.  Roch  seems  to  have  been  the  most  real  and  most 
important  of  all  these  aesthetic  conversions.  But  for 
that  "sunny,  but  luckless,  day,"  when  the  porter 
opened  the  door  of  the  then  neglected  hall  as  if  they 
were  the  gates  of  Paradise,  Ruskin  thinks  he  should  have 
written  the  Stones  of  Chamouni  instead  of  the  Stones 
of  Venice.  But  Tintoretto  swept  him  away  into  the 
schools  of  Venice,  forcing  him  to  the  study  of  the 
history  of  Venice  itself.  This  was  the  new  heaven  of 
invention    into   which    he   was   suddenly   summoned. 


IV.]  MODERN  PAINTERS  49 

And  at  the  same  time  came  on  him — and  on  the  world 
— "a  new  fatality,"  the  consequences  of  which  he  little 
saw  at  the  moment — the  discovery  of  photography. 

At  Venice  with  Harding,  studying  pictures  and 
sunsets,  they  were  joined  by  Boxall,  R.A.,  some  time 
keeper  of  the  National  Gallery ;  and  they  saw  much  of 
Mrs.  Jameson — who  was  "absolutely  "wdthout  know- 
ledge or  instinct  of  painting  " — but  candid,  industrious, 
and  pleasant.  A  fever  drove  him  away — evidently 
malarious,  though  he  will  not  admit  it — nobody  goes 
studying  in  Venice  without  catchi^^g  malaria ;  and  he 
dragged  himself  home  in  deep  depression,  and  with  a 
vision  of  death  before  him.  He  now,  he  tells  us,  almost 
for  the  first  time,  prayed  to  God  with  fervent  belief  and 
deep  humility.  And  there  he  had  the  consciousness  of 
his  prayer  being  answered.  The  experience  did  not 
last.  Little  by  little  the  sense  of  direct  relation  with 
Heaven  passed  away  from  him.  He  had  scarcely 
reached  home  in  safety  before  he  had  "  sunk  back  into 
the  faintness  and  darkness  of  the  Under- World." 

In  Prcetei-ita  (ii.  159),  Ruskin  has  attempted  to 
describe  his  religious  attitude  whilst  writing  volume  ii. 
of  Modern  Painters ;  but  we  must  not  forget  that  this  was 
looking  backward  forty  years,  and  the  whole  of  these 
Confessions  are  coloured  by  a  half-ironical  humbleness 
of  temper  very  hard  to  measure. 

"  It  is  extremely  di£&cult  to  define,"  he  says,  "  much  more  to 
explain,  the  religious  temper  in  which  I  designed  that  second 
volume.  Whatever  I  know  or  feel  now  of  the  justice  of  God, 
the  nobleness  of  man,  and  the  beauty  of  nature,  I  knew  and 
felt  then,  nor  less  strongly  :  but  these  firm  faiths  were  confused 
by  the  continual  discovery,  day  by  day,  of  error  or  limitation  in 
the  doctrines  I  had  been  taught,  and  folHes  or  inconsistencies 


50  JOHN  RUSION  [chap. 

in  their  teachers  ;  -while  for  myself,  it  seemed  to  me  quite  sure, 
since  my  downfall  of  heart  on  last  lea^-ing  France,  that  I  had  no 
part  nor.lot  in  the  privileges  of  the  saints ;  but,  on  the  contrary, 
had  such  share  only  in  the  things  of  God,  as  well-conducted 
beasts  and  serenely-minded  birds  had,"  etc.,  etc.,  etc. 

Ruskin  never  would  see,  as  so  many  persons  refuse 
to  see,  how  largely  states  of  temperament,  of  health, 
and  of  grief,  hope,  and  despair,  react  on  spiritual 
impressions  and  religious  elation.  ''Experiences,"  like 
ghosts,  are  too  often  problems  for  the  physician. 
Ruskin's  attitude  as  to  religion,  whilst  he  never  became 
a  sceptic  or  an  atheist,  continually  shifted,  and  was  in 
curiously  close  relation  to  his  moral,  mental,  and 
physical  equilibrium  at  the  time. 

The  very  sentence  just  cited  ends  in  some  delicious 
raillery  about  the  coat  of  arms  which  the  prosperous 
wine  merchant  now  chose  to  place  upon  the  carriage 
he  set  up  at  this  time.  It  Avas  varied  from  the  family 
coat  of  Ruskin :  sable,  a  chevron  between  six  lance-heads, 
argent,  by  an  addition  on  the  chevron  of  three  cross- 
crosslets  gules  ("in  case  of  my  still  becoming  a 
clergyman ! ") ;  and  for  crest,  after  much  poring  over 
heraldic  books,  a  boar's  head  was  chosen,  and  the 
motto  "age,  quod  agis" — a  crest  which  John  would 
perversely  call  a  pig,  and  himself  as  "Little  Pig"; 
and  the  motto  was  exchanged  into  "  To-day."  It  was 
this  crest  of  the  Boar's  head  which  occasioned  the 
famous  rhyme  in  Punch  (?by  Tom  Taylor) — 

"  I  paints  and  paints, 
Hears  no  complaints, 

And  sells  before  I  'm  dry, 
TiU  savage  Euskin 
Sticks  his  tusk  in, 

And  nobody  will  buy." 


IV.]  MODERN  PAINTERS  51 

And  in  further  allusion  to  the  Boar,  he  took  as  his 
patron  saint  Saint  Anthony  of  Padua,  who  is  repre- 
sented in  solitude  amongst  the  swine. 

All  the  winter  of  1845-46,  Euskin  was  at  work  on 
his  second  volume,  which  appeared  early  in  the  summer 
of  1846.  He  had  two  distinct  instincts  to  satisfy  in  it, 
he  writes :  the  first,  to  explain  the  quality  of  the 
beauty  in  all  happy  conditions  of  living  organism  ;  the 
second,  to  illustrate  two  schools  then  unknown  to  the 
British  public — that  of  Angelico  in  Florence,  and 
Tintoretto  in  Venice.  The  style  of  the  book  was 
modelled  on  Hooker,  which  was  a  pity.  And,  not 
unnaturally,  when  it  was  ended,  he  felt  tired.  "It  is 
usually  read  only  for  its  pretty  passages,"  he  thinks; 
"its  theory  of  beauty  is  scarcely  ever  noticed";  and 
its  praise  of  Tintoretto  did  not  induce  the  nation  to 
buy  any  good  example  of  him.  But  it  led,  he  feels 
sure,  to  a  truer  estimate  of  early  religious  art.  and  to 
a  deeper  interest  in  the  painters  he  had  glorified. 
Yes  !  it  did  this — and  it  did  much  more.  His  personal 
and  literary  influence  turned  the  taste  of  the  age 
towards  what  the  French  call  the  "Primitives,"  and 
secured  for  them  an  adequate  place  in  our  National 
Gallery  and  public  and  private  collections. 


CHAPTER   V 

THE  SEVEX  LAMPS  OF  ARCHITECTURE 

Hardly  were  the  last  pages  of  Modern  Painters,  vol.  il., 
returned  "for  Press,"  when  the  tired  writer  and  his 
family  set  off  again  for  the  Alps,  That  unfailing 
remedy  for  all  ills  was  not  tried  in  vain — "the  power 
of  mountains  in  solemnising  the  thoughts  and  puri- 
fying  the  heart."  He  records  the  "immeasurable 
delight"  of  watching  the  ship  plunging  through  the 
waves  towards  Calais  pier,  and  the  prospect  "of  the 
horses'  heads  set  straight  for  Mont  Blanc  to-morrow." 
They  crossed  the  Mont  Cenis  to  Turin,  Verona,  and 
Venice ;  and  John  tried,  with  scanty  success,  to  convert 
his  father  from  Modern  Painters  to  Venetian  archi- 
tecture. The  son  was  impetuous ;  but  the  father  was 
obstinate.  John  says  that  he  too  was  "viciously 
stubborn "  as  well  as  impetuous ;  and  "more  and  more 
persuaded  every  day  that  everybody  was  always 
wrong."  But  he  insists  that  his  arrogance  was  founded 
not  on  vanity,  but  in  sorrow.  "Accuse  me  not  of 
arrogance,"  he  says,  "if,  having  walked  with  nature," 
his  one  thought  was  to  learn,  to  teach  truth,  not  to 
win  fame.     And  this  is  absolutely  true. 

They  all  returned  to  Chamouni,  where  more  studies 
of  rocks  and  glaciers  were  made  with  intense  rapture. 
The   martinets    who   used   to  sneer   at   the    sonorous 

52 


v.]      THE  SEVEN  LAMPS  OF  ARCHITECTURE       53 

sentences  of  these  art  books  as  if  it  were  clap-trap 
word-painting,  coloured  to  catch  the  groundlings,  might 
be  surprised  to  see  in  the  private  diaries  of  this 
time  the  same  realist  painting,  the  same  overflowing 
language.  These  were  mere  notes,  jotted  down  at 
night,  intended  for  no  eye  but  his  own,  to  record 
impressions ;  and  yet  they  have  the  precision,  the  glow, 
and  even  the  music  of  his  finished  books.  Ruskin,  like 
Stephen  Phillips's  "Herod,"  "thought  in  gold  and 
dreamed  in  silver"  words,  even  in  his  inmost  medi- 
tations. The  jottings  of  his  private  day-book  fell 
spontaneously  into  magnificent  imagery  and  glowing 
pictures — 

^''August  23  (1840). — Eained  all  day — note  the  intense 
scarletty  purple  of  the  shattered  larch  stems,  wet,  opposed 
with  yellow  from  decomposing  turpentine  ;  the  alder  stems 
looking  much  like  birch,  covered  with  the  white  branchy  moss 
that  looks  like  coral." 

This  bit — much  the  same  in  words  as  one  of  Turner's 
note-sketches — was  not  printed  for  nearly  fifty  years 
after  it  was  written  do^vn.  And  here  is  another  bit 
from  the  diary  (26th  July  1854) — 

"  I  was  up  by  the  mill-stream  this  evening,  and  climbed  to 
the  right  of  it,  up  among  the  sloping  waves  of  grass.  I  never 
was  so  struck  by  theh*  intense  beauty — the  masses  of  walnut 
shading  them  with  their  broad,  cool,  clearly-formed  leafage  ; 
the  grey  glossy  stems  of  the  cherry  trees,  as  if  bound  round 
tight  with  satin,  twining  and  writhing  against  the  shadows  ; 
the  tall  pollards  of  oak  set  here  and  there  in  the  soft  banks,  as 
if  to  show  their  smoothness  by  contrast,  yet  themselves  beauti- 
ful, rugged,  and  covered  with  deep  brown  and  bright  silver 
moss.  Here  and  there  a  chestnut — sharp,  and  soft,  and 
starry ;  and  always  the  steep  banks,  one  above  another, 
melting  into  terraces  of  pure  velvet,  gilded  with  corn ;  here 


54  JOHN  RUSKIX  [chap. 

and  there  a  black— jet-black— crag  of  slate  breaking  into  a 
frown  above  them,  and  mouldering  away  down  into  the  gloomy- 
torrent  bed,  fringed  on  its  opposite  edge,  a  grisly  cliff,  with 
delicate  birch  and  pine,  rising  against  the  snow  light  of  Mont 
Blanc.  And  opposite  always  the  mighty  Varens  lost  in  the 
cloud  its  ineflFable  walls  of  crag." 

Your  Alpine  tourist  does  not  look  in  this  way,  does 
not  see  in  this  way,  and  his  diary  at  night  is  not  so 
kept.  But  Euskin  felt  like  this  and  Avrote  like  this — 
he  could  not  help  it — even  to  remind  himself  in  private 
of  the  vision  in  which  he  had  taken  such  joy. 

Eeturning  home,  the  young  author  found  himself 
already  famous  and  welcomed  in  the  world  of  letters. 
Miss  Mitford  found  him  "the  most  charming  person 
that  I  have  ever  known."  John  Murray  sought  to 
enlist  him  for  Albemarle  Street,  and  Lockhart  enrolled 
him  in  the  Quarterly  Review.  He  was  induced  to  write 
a  review  of  Lord  Lindsay's  Christian  Art.  He  says  he 
knew  that  Lord  Lindsay  knew  more  about  Italian 
painting  than  he  did  himself,  but  there  was  another 
motive — "one  of  an  irresistible  nature."  Charlotte, 
Lockhart's  daughter,  "  a  Scottish  fairy,  White  Lady, 
and  witch  of  the  fatallest  sort,  looking  as  if  she  had 
just  risen  out  of  the  stream  in  Khymer's  Glen,  and 
could  only  be  seen  by  favouring  glance  of  moonlight 
over  the  Eildons,"  was  met  at  the  house  of  Sir 
Humphry  Davy's  widow.  John  naturally  fell  in 
love  with  Sir  AValter  Scott's  fairy  grand-daughter, 
sighed  in  silence,  could  never  come  to  any  serious 
speech  with  her,  "she  didn't  care  for  a  word  I  said"; 
and  so  at  the  dinner-table  quarrelled  with  Mr.  Glad- 
stone about  Neapolitan  prisons  across  her,  as  usual  did 
his  wooing  by  the  pen,  wrote  on  Christian  Art  in  order 


v.]      THE  SEVEN  LAATPS  OF  ARCHITECTURE       55 

to  charm  her,  found  it  hopeless,  went  away  in  despair, 
again  fell  into  despondency  and  sickness  ;  and  Charlotte 
Lockhart,  as  we  know,  married  Hope  Scott. 

Reduced  again  to  a  heap  of  white  ashes  in  the  spring 
of  1847,  he  retired  to  Ambleside  and  fell  into  a  state  of 
despondency  such  as  he  did  not  know  again  till  1861 ; 
and  what  with  disappointment,  dyspepsia,  and  the 
tedium  of  his  Quarterly  article,  he  came  home  in  such 
a  state  of  ill-health  that  his  parents  sent  him  off  again 
to  be  treated  by  Dr.  Jephson  at  Leamington.  And 
now,  failing  in  love,  he  surrendered  himself  to  friend- 
ship. He  says,  "  I  get  distinctively  attached  to  places, 
to  pictures,  to  dogs,  cats,  and  girls" — but  to  a  soul- 
kinship  with  men  he  was  not  at  all  disposed.  Let  no 
one  suppose  that  John  Ruskin  was  a  man  without 
friends,  and  did  not  cherish  many  life-long  friendships. 
He  was  one  of  the  most  lovable  and  loving  of  men, 
full  of  sympathy  and  open  heart.  But  his  friendships 
with  men  were  not  that  consuming  passion  as  was  his 
love  of  mountains,  seas,  pets,  and  paintings  So  off  he 
went  to  visit  Macdonald  Macdonald  at  Crossmount 
beneath  Schehallien  in  the  Highlands.  Disgusted  with 
"sport,"  in  melancholy  mood,  he  dug  up  thistles  on 
the  moor,  lay  awake  listening  to  the  hooting  of  the 
owls,  and  sadly  pondered  upon  this  life — on  Calvinist 
religion — and  the  life  to  come. 

Now  here  occurs  a  big  gap  of  two  years  in  the 
author's  autobiography ;  and  it  must  remain  a  gap  in 
our  story.  The  tenth  chapter  of  Proeterita  ends  with 
the  autumn  of  1847;  and  the  eleventh  chapter  opens 
in  July  1849.  During  the  two  years  there  took  place 
his  marriage,  the  bridegroom's  dangerous  illness,  his 
settling  in  Park  Street,  London,  and  his  writing  the 


56  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

Seven  Lamps  of  Architecture.  Of  all  this  lie  has  told  us 
nothing,  and  what  concerns  the  public  can  be  told  in  a 
few  words.  The  parents  came  to  the  conclusion  that 
John's  health  and  spirits  were  only  to  be  cured  by 
matrimony;  and  they  pressed  him  to  marry  the 
daughter  of  their  old  Perthshire  friends,  the  Grays. 
Seven  years  before  this  they  had  been  visitois  at 
Heme  Hill ;  and  the  girl  had  challenged  John  to  write 
her  a  fairy-story,  which  he  cheerfully  undertook.  It 
was  the  King  of  the  Golden  River — a  medley  of  Grimm, 
Dickens,  and  the  Alps.  Accordingly,  somewhat 
suddenly  and  perhaps  unthinkingly,  John  Ruskin 
was  married  at  Perth  to  Euphemia  Chalmers  Gray  on 
10th  April  1848— a  day  famous  in  the  annals  of  London 
Chartism.  She  was  a  grand  beauty,  of  high  spirit, 
whom  all  the  world  knows  as  the  triumphant  wife  in 
the  famous  picture,  "The  Order  for  Release, "  in  the 
Tate  Gallery.  On  their  way  south,  Ruskin  caught 
a  sharp  attack  in  the  lungs  whilst  sketching  in  Salisbury 
Cathedral,  and  his  life  was  in  great  danger.  Foreign 
travel,  the  invariable  panacea,  and  in  company  with 
the  whole  family,  was  tried  again ;  but  a  fresh  attack 
in  Normandy  forced  them  back.  At  last  they  set  off, 
stopping  at  cathedral  cities,  John  absorbed  in  archi- 
tecture. In  October  the  pair  set  up  house  in  Park 
Street,  and  Ruskin  fell  with  fury  on  the  compiling  his 
Seven  Lamps,  which  occupied  him  the  winter  of  1848-49. 
It  was  published  in  the  spring  of  1849;  but  in  the 
meantime  the  whole  Ruskin  family  were  off  again  to 
the  Alps — John  with  Couttet  the  guide  and  George 
the  valet,  but  apparently  without  his  wife. 

At  any  rate,  her  name  is  never  mentioned  in  the 
diaries  of  travel  in  the  Alps,  in  Prceterita  or  Fors,  nor 


v.]      THE  SEVEN  LAMPS  OF  ARCHITECTURE       57 

in  the  Memoirs  sanctioned  by  the  family  and  their 
friends.  Nor  does  it  concern  the  public  to  tear  down 
the  veil  they  have  chosen  to  draw  round  the  married 
life  of  John  Ruskin.  It  is  evident  that  it  brought  no 
happiness  to  either,  and  was  but  marriage  in  name, 
though  no  suggestion  of  rupture  or  dispute  has  ever 
been  made  known.  During  the  whole  time  Ruskin 
pursued  his  architectural  studies  with  eagerness,  wrote, 
travelled,  and  collected  materials.  London  and  Society 
bored  him  and  irritated  him,  whilst  they  absorbed  the 
wife.  He  once  took  her  to  a  ball  at  Venice,  and  to 
Court  at  Buckingham  Palace.  In  the  summer  of  1853 
J.  Everett  Millais,  aft-erwards  President  of  the  Royal 
Academy,  stayed  with  the  Ruskins  at  Glenfinlas,  where 
he  painted  both.  One  day  the  wife  left  her  husband 
and  returned  to  her  parents.  A  suit  in  the  Scotch 
court  for  nullity  of  marriage  was  brought  by  the  wife, 
and  was  not  defended  by  the  husband.  Euphemia 
Gray  then  married  the  brilliant  painter,  and  was  well 
known  as  Lady  Millais  in  the  world  of  London  and  of 
Perthshire.  John  returned  to  his  parents  at  Denmark 
Hill,  and  remained  with  them  there  till  their  deaths. 
Neither  the  marriage,  nor  the  nullification  of  it,  seriously 
affected  his  habits  or  his  books.  It  is  not  the  duty  of 
a  biographer  to  pass  judgment  on  this  miserable  episode 
in  a  chequered  life. 

The  Seven  Lamps  of  Architecture  had  been  looked  for 
with  lively  expectancy  by  the  world  of  culture,  and  it  did 
not  disappoint  their  hopes.  The  book  did  for  the  art  of 
building  what  Modern  Painters  had  done  for  the  art  of 
painting :  it  shook  conventional  ideas  to  the  root,  and 
flung  forth  a  body  of  new  and  pregnant  ideas.  It  was 
marked  by  the  same  fearlessness,  a  dogmatism  as  great, 


58  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

and  an  even  more  stirring  eloquence.  It  was  the  first 
of  these  works  to  appear  with  illustrations;  and  it 
opened  a  brilliant  series  of  writings,  in  which  the  critic 
combined  an  irresistible  gift  of  language  with  an  ex- 
quisite mastery  of  the  pencil.  It  addressed  also  a  much 
larger  world  than  Modern  Painters  could  do.  The 
lovers  of  Turner,  Hunt,  Angelico,  and  Tintoretto  were 
at  that  date  few.  But  all  men  could  see  or  take 
interest  in  public  buildings ;  and  the  young  reformer 
boldly  laid  down  laws  for  ordinary  homes  and  even 
house  decoration.  The  Lamps  accordingly  lighted  up 
a  new  region  and  shone  across  a  far  wider  circle  of 
readers. 

The  Seven  Lamps  (and  he  tells  us  the  difiiculty  he 
had  to  prevent  their  becoming  eight  or  even  nine)  were 
Truth,  Beauty,  Power,  Sacrifice,  Obedience,  Labour, 
Memory ;  and  to  each  of  these  moral,  intellectual,  and 
spiritual  ideas  to  be  represented  in  stone,  he  devoted 
a  chapter  of  marvellous  ingenuity,  enthusiasm,  and 
eloquence.  Needless  to  add  that  they  bristled  with 
paradoxes,  contradictions,  sophisms,  and  wild  hypo- 
theses. It  would  require  an  entire  volume  to  state 
them  all,  and  three  more  volumes  to  analyse  and  dis- 
entangle them  from  the  truths  to  which  they  clung  like 
the  ivy  and  mosses  on  a  tower  of  limestone  The 
truths  were  cemented  into  the  foundations,  and  have 
stood  solid  and  unshaken  for  two  generations.  The 
law  of  Truth  in  Art  stands  beside  Carlyle's  protest 
against  "  Shams  !  "  That  a  building  should  look  what 
it  is,  and  be  what  it  is  built  to  serve — no  one  now  dares 
dispute.  That  beauty  itself  comes  second  to  truth, 
and  must  be  sought  in  the  architecture  of  Nature  her- 
self;   that  the  art  of  building  reflects   the   life   and 


v.]      THE  SEVEN  LAMPS  OF  ARCHITECTURE       59 

manners,  the  passions  and  religion,  of  those  who  build ; 
that  in  building  we  have  to  consider  the  hands  by 
which  it  is  wrought ;  that  art  is  not  an  end  in  itself, 
but  the  instrument  wherein  moral,  intellectual,  national, 
and  social  ideals  are  expressed ; — all  this  is  now  the 
alphabet  of  sound  art. 

The  Seven  Lamps  is  the  work  which  the  author  him- 
self has  most  vehemently  criticised,  and  in  which  he 
seems  to  take  the  least  interest.  It  is  hardly  referred 
to  in  Prceterifa,  or  in  Fors,  except  by  way  of  disparage- 
ment. Not,  perhaps,  that  he  specially  rejects  the 
opinions  there  expressed,  except  his  early  Puritanism, 
but  he  condemns  it  for  the  purpurei  j)anni  of  the  book, 
its  rhetoric,  and  display  of  word-painting.  It  must 
be  confessed  that  there  is  in  it  more  conscious  literary 
gesticulation  than  in  any  other  of  his  works,  and  its 
whole  style  is  in  contrast  with  the  simplicity  and  ease 
of  his  social  writings.  But  it  is  the  eloquence  of 
passion,  not  of  display ;  and  if  it  be  too  often  splendid 
declamation,  the  grandeur  of  the  language  is  in  har- 
mony with  the  elevation  of  the  thought.  One  does  not 
condemn  the  Sermons  of  Bossuet,  or  the  diatribes  of 
Milton,  because  they  may  be  accused  of  "eloquence." 
I  am  disposed  to  hold  that  English  prose  has  no  more 
impressive  passage  than  the  famous  peroration  to  the 
"Lamp  of  Sacrifice."  It  is  oddly  enough  about 
"Luxuriance  of  Ornament" — 

"Ornament  cannot  ]>e  overcharged  if  it  be  good,  and  is 
always  overcharged  when  it  is  had.  .  .  .  Those  very  styles  of 
haughty  simplicity  owe  part  of  their  pleasantness  to  contrast, 
and  would  be  wearisome  if  universal.  They  are  but  the  rests 
and  monotones  of  the  art ;  it  is  to  far  happier,  far  higher, 
exaltation  that  we  owe  those  fair  fronts  of  variegated  mosaic. 


60  JOHN  BUSKIN  [chap. 

charged  with  wild  fancies  and  dark  hosts  of  imagery,  thicker 
and  quainter  than  ever  filled  the  depth  of  midsummer  dream  ; 
those  vaulted  gates,  treUised  with  close  leaves  ;  those  window 
labyrrnths  of  twisted  tracery  and  starry  light ;  those  misty 
masses  of  multitudinous  pinnacle  and  diademed  tower ;  the 
only  witnesses,  perhaps,  that  remain  to  us  of  the  faith  and 
fear  of  nations.  All  else  for  which  the  builders  sacrificed  has 
passed  away — all  their  living  interests,  and  aims,  and  achieve- 
ments. We  know  not  for  what  they  laboured,  and  we  see 
no  evidence  of  their  reward.  Victory,  wealth,  authority, 
happiness — all  have  departed,  though  bought  by  many  a 
bitter  sacrifice.  But  of  them  and  their  life  and  their  toil 
upon  the  earth,  one  reward,  one  evidence,  is  left  to  us  in 
those  grey  heaps  of  deep-^vrought  stone.  They  have  taken 
with  them  to  the  grave  their  powers,  their  honours,  and  their 
errors  ;  but  they  have  left  us  their  adoration." 

No  man  of  feeling  -svho  has  in  him  the  echoes  of  this 
funeral  sermon  can  stand  before  a  great  mediaeval 
cathedral  without  being  conscious  that  it  has  gained 
for  him  a  new  meaning,  a  sublimer  pathos. 

And  what  teaching  there  is  in  the  famous  lesson  as 
to  "  Chiaroscuro  in  Architecture  " ! 

"  I  do  not  believe  that  any  building  was  ever  truly  great, 
unless  it  had  mighty  masses,  vigorous  and  deep,  of  shadow 
mingled  with  its  surface.  And  among  the  first  habits  that 
a  young  architect  should  learn,  is  that  of  thinking  in  shadow, 
not  looking  at  a  design  in  its  miserable,  liny  skeleton  ;  but 
conceiving  it  as  it  will  be  when  the  dawn  lights  it  and  the 
dusk  leaves  it ;  when  its  stones  will  be  hot  and  its  crannies 
cool ;  when  the  lizards  will  bask  on  the  one  and  the  birds 
build  in  the  other.  Let  him  design  with  the  sense  of  cold 
and  heat  upon  him  ;  let  him  cut  out  the  shadows,  as  men  dig 
wells  in  unwatered  plains,  and  lead  along  the  lights,  as  a 
founder  does  his  hot  metal ;  let  him  keep  the  full  command 
of  both,  and  see  that  he  knows  how  they  fall,  and  where  they 
fade.     His  paper  lines  and  proportions  are  of  no  value ;  all 


v.]       TEE  SEVEN  LAMPS  OF  ARCHITECTURE       61 

that  he  has  to  do  must  be  done  by  spaces  of  light  and  dark- 
ness ;  and  his  business  is  to  see  that  the  one  is  broad  and  bold 
enough  not  to  be  sw'allowed  up  by  twilight,  and  the  other 
deep  enough  not  to  be  dried  like  a  shallow  pool  by  a  noonday 


Who  can  forget  the  hymn  to  Giotto's  Campanile,  or 
to  the  porticoes  of  Rouen  and  Lucca,  and  the  mosaics 
of  St.  Mark,  or  the  noble  protest  against  "Restora- 
tion," and  that  counsel  of  perfection  to  raise  permanent 
homes  for  ourselves,  and  to  respect  that  "sanctity  in 
a  good  man's  house  that  cannot  be  renewed  "  ? 

M.  Jacques  Bardoux  of  Paris,  in  his  excellent  book 
John  Buskin,  insists  that  his  principal  art  works  are 
those  on  architecture,  and  that  the  Seven  Lamps  and 
the  Stones  of  Venice  are  the  two  of  most  importance. 
So  far  as  relates  to  his  aesthetic  teaching  this  is  true. 
It  seems  that  the  Seven  Lamps  has  had  more  visible 
and  practical  ejffect  on  cur  modern  life  than  any  other 
of  his  books,  in  spite  of  all  its  heresies  and  impractica- 
bilities. And  it  must  not  be  forgotten  how  saturated 
it  is  Avith  moral  and  social  fervour,  how  inexorably  it 
forces  art  to  find  its  right  to  exist  in  the  moral  law, 
and  how  deeply  it  inspires  in  the  artist  the  regard  for 
humanity  and  for  duty.  The  gospel  of  the  Sei}en 
Lamps,  after  all,  is  not  preached  to  inculcate  the  virtue 
of  Gothic  traceries  or  Venetian  arcades,  but  the 
moralisation  and  the  socialisation  of  all  art — and 
especially  of  the  arts  of  building :  which,  in  truth, 
affect  human  life,  domestic,  social,  political,  and  reli- 
gious, far  more  constantly  and  more  deeply  than  any 
other  art  can  do. 

It  was  the  studies  and  the  meditation  which  are 
embodied  in  the  Seven  Lamps  that  first  turned  John 


62  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chaf.  v. 

Kuskin  from  drawings  to  man,  from  wall  pictures  to 
history  and  to  social  institutions — which  converted  him 
at  last  from  an  aesthetic  connoisseur  into  a  moralist 
who  went  forth  into  a  scornful  world  to  teach  a  new 
Gospel  of  Work  and  a  regeneration  of  the  Social 
Organism. 


CHAPTER    VI 

THE  STONES   OF  VENICE 

Buskin's  first  sight  of  Venice  was  in  1835,  at  the  age 
of  sixteen,  when  he  was  taken  away  from  school  after 
the  attack  of  pleurisy.  In  May  1841,  when  he  was 
twenty-two,  during  his  Oxford  career,  he  again  spent 
ten  days  in  Venice.  He  recovered  heart,  he  says,  after 
that  melancholy  winter  in  Eome,  as  the  enchanted 
world  of  Venice  opened  in  front  of  him.  He  has  told 
us  of  his  joys  in  those  early  days  of  the  sea-city  before 
the  railway  was  begun,  "when  everything,  muddy 
Brenta,  vulgar  villa,  dusty  causeway,  sandy  beach, 
was  equally  rich  in  rapture,  on  the  morning  that 
brought  us  in  sight  of  Venice;  and  the  black  knot 
of  gondolas  in  the  canal  of  Mestre  were  more  beautiful 
to  me  than  a  sunrise  full  of  clouds  all  scarlet  and  gold." 
How  to  tell,  how  to  explain  this  rapture,  he  knows  not. 
His  Venice,  he  says,  like  Turner's,  had  been  chiefly 
created  for  him  by  Byron ;  but  besides  there  was  for 
Ruskin  "  the  childish  passion  of  pleasure  "  in  watching 
the  boats  and  the  gondolas  and  marble  walls  rising 
out  of  the  salt  sea,  with  hosts  of  little  brown  crabs  on 
them,  and  Titians  inside.  In  his  diary  for  6th  May 
1841,  he  finds  written :—" Thank  God,  I  am  here;  it 
is  the  Paradise  of  cities.  .  .  .  This  and  Chamouni  are 
my  two  bournes  of  earth." 

63 


64  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

It  was  in  1845,  when  he  was  twentj-six,  that  he 
first  rose  to  the  full  height  of  understanding  Venetian 
Art,  with  Harding  the  painter  as  his  companion.  It 
was  in  his  memorable  visit  to  the  School  of  St. 
Roch  that  the  power  of  Tintoretto's  imagination  first 
impressed  him,  and  "forced  him  into  the  study  of  the 
history  of  Venice  herself."  He  had  made  careful 
sketches  there  both  in  1841  and  1845;  and  on  the 
publication  of  the  Seven  Lamps,  he  resolved  to  write 
the  Stones  of  Venice,  even  before  Modern  Painters  was 
completed.  The  new  work  was  to  be  no  book  on 
Architecture,  any  more  than  Modern  Painters  was  a 
book  on  Painting.  It  was  to  be  a  concrete  expansion 
of  the  Lamps — the  intimate  action  and  reaction  of 
beliefs,  ideals,  and  habits  upon  the  external  aspect  of 
nations,  their  art,  their  homes,  and  their  public  and 
private  buildings.  It  was  to  be  a  "sermon  in  stones," 
addressed  to  the  English  nation,  which  had  so  many 
historic  analogies  with  the  Venetian  oligarchy — which 
a  similar  career  of  pride,  luxury^  and  infidelity_3vould 
eventually  lead  to  the  same  decay. 

In  his  second  lecture  in  the  Croivn  of  Wild  Olive  he 
thus  explains  the  purpose  of  his  two  main  works  on 
Architecture : — 

"The  book  I  called  the  Seven  Lamps  was  to  show  that 
certain  right  states  of  temper  and  moral  feeling  were  the  magic 
po^vers  by  which  all  good  architecture  without  exception  had 
been  produced.  The  Stones  of  Venice  had,  from  beginning 
to  end,  no  other  aim  than  to  show  that  the  Gothic  architecture 
of  Venice  had  arisen  out  of,  and  indicated  in  all  its  features, 
a  state  of  pure  national  faith  and  of  domestic  virtue ;  and 
that  its  Eenaissance  architecture  had  arisen  out  of,  and  in  all 
its  features  indicated,  a  state  of  concealed  national  infidehty 
and  of  domestic  corruption.  ...  In  all  mj  past  work,  my 


VI.]  THE  STONES  OF  VENICE  65 

endeavour  has  been  to  show  that  good  architecture  is  essen- 
tially religious — the  production  of  a  faithful  and  virtuous,  not 
of  an  infidel  and  corrupted  people.  But  I  have  had  also  to 
sho^y  that  good  architecture  is  not  ecclesiastical.  .  .  .  Good 
architecture  has  always  been  the  work  of  the  commonalty,  jiot 
of  the  clergy.  ...  It  is  the  manly  language  of  a  people  inspired 
by  resolute  and  common  purpose,  and  rendering  resolute  and 
common  fidelity  to  the  legible  laws  of  an  undoubted  Grod." 

"The  Stones  of  Venice"  he  wrote  in  the  last  volume 
of  Fors  (1877),  "taught  the  laws  of  constructive  art, 
and  the  dependence  of  all  human  work  or  edifice  for 
its  beauty  on  the  happy  life  of  the  workman."     This 
is,  in  truth,  the  keynote  of  Ruskin's  philosophy  of  art, 
and  the  link  that  binds  his  philosophy  of  art  to  his 
ultimate  social  gospel.     It  embodies  in  essence  a  great 
and  most  potent  truth,  if  by  "religion"  we  mean  an 
active   reverence  for  a   dominant  moral   ideal.      The 
idea  is  not  new.     For  as  I  reminded  Ruskin  in  1876, 
Auguste  Comte  had  long  before  spoken  of  mediaeval 
cathedrals  as  the  most  perfect  expression  of  the  ideas 
and  feelings  of  man's  moral  nature.     To  extend  this 
law  to  all  forms  of  art,  and  to  give  it  the  absolute 
character  that  Ruskin  attempted,  involves  us  in  hope- 
less paradox  and  mischievous  absurdities.    As  I  pointed 
out  to  Fors  Clavigera,  the  very  pictures  of  Perugino, 
Titian,  and  Tintoretto  were  painted  in  societies  corrupt 
and  sensual  to  the  core ;  one  side  of  Greek  sculpture 
was  actually  inspired  by  a  detestable  type  of  vice ;  and 
the   triumphs   of   music   date  from   times   of   curious 
afi*ectation  and  rottenness.      It   never  seems  to  have 
occurred  to  Ruskin  that  the  very  works  of  imagina- 
tion which  he  adores  as  almost  divine  were  exactly 
contemporary  with  others  that  he  treats  as  emanation 


66  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

from  hell ;  that  many  of  the  purest  works  of  art  were 
produced  in  times  of  foul  crime ;  that  some  of  the 
most  devout  and  moral  of  nations  have  expressed  their 
artistic  longings  in  terms  of  vulgar  commonplace. 

Architecture  is  far  the  most  social  and  national  of  all 
the  arts ;  and,  more  than  any  other  art,  is  affected  by 
the  moral  tone  dominant  in  the  society  that  employs  it 
and  by  the  national  ideals  in  vogue ;  and  that  for  the 
simple  reason  that  all  great  buildings  are  raised  by  the 
public  for  the  use  of  the  public,  and  not  by  individual 
artists  for  the  enjoyment  of  a  single  owner.  But,  even 
in  architecture,  these  sweeping  generalisations  are  wont 
to  burst  like  bubbles.  Among  the  noblest  buildings 
ever  raised  by  man,  and  those  which  have  exerted  the 
most  potent  influence  on  after  ages,  we  must  count  the 
Parthenon,  the  Pantheon  at  Eome,  the  Church  of 
S.  Sophia  at  Constantinople,  and  St.  Paul's  in  London. 
The  Parthenon  was  nearly  contemporary  with  the 
comedies  of  Aristophanes  and  the  Sophists  of  Athens 
— not  with  Marathon  and  ^^schylus.  The  Pantheon, 
now  known  to  be  of  the  age  of  Hadrian,  was  nearly 
contemporary  with  the  satires  of  Juvenal  and  the 
epigrams  of  Martial.  S.  Sophia  was  built  by  the 
husband  of  the  Empress  Theodora ;  and  St.  Paul's  was 
building  in  the  era  of  Charles  li.  and  James  II.  Were 
all  these  sublime  masterpieces  of  the  building  art — 
Parthenon,  Pantheon,  S.  Sophia,  and  St.  Paul's — "the 
production  of  a  faithful  and  virtuous  people  "  ?  It  is 
curious  that  they  synchronise  with  some  of  the  most 
scathing  satires  upon  personal  and  social  corruption 
that  survive  in  Greek,  Latin,  Byzantine,  and  English 
literature. 

The  author  tells  us  of  "  the  steady  course  of  historical 


VI.]  THE  STONES  OF  VENICE  67 

reading  by  which  he  prepared  himself  to  write  the 
Stones  of  Venice  " ;  how  his  study  of  history  prevented 
him  from  accepting  Catholic  teaching,  for  all  his 
reverence  for  the  Catholic  art  of  the  great  ages ;  how 
about  this  time  he  made  the  inevitable  discovery  of  the 
falseness  of  the  religious  doctrines  in  which  he  had 
been  educated— what  he  calls  "  the  breaking  down  of 
his  Puritan  faith."  In  Prceterita  he  tells  us  the  ten 
years  1850-1860  were  "for  the  most  part  wasted  in 
useless  work,"  and  he  thus  records  the  time  in  diary 
fashion : — 

"1851.  Turner  dies,  while  I  am  at  first  main  work  in 
Venice  for  the  Stones  of  Venice. 

1852.  Final  work  in  Venice  for  Stones  of  Venice.  Book 
finished  that  winter.  Six  hundred  quarto  pages  of  notes  of  it, 
fairly  and  closely  written,  now  useless.  Drawings  as  many — 
of  a  sort — useless  too." 

But  in  this  case,  as  in  the  rest  of  such  autobiographic 
notes,  we  must  remember  that  it  was  written  nearly 
forty  years  after  the  events  ;  that  his  later  years  were 
too  often  a  time  of  sadness,  of  self-depreciation,  of 
recantation ;  and  that  we  cannot  trust  his  memory  or 
take  too  literally  what  he  has  written  of  himself  at  any 
date  after  his  long  illness  of  1878.  The  Stones  of  Venice 
was,  in  fact,  one  of  the  most  rapidly  executed  and  most 
complete  of  all  his  works.  He  went  to  Venice  in 
November  1849,  and  settled  there  with  his  wife.  He 
plunged  into  minute  study  of  the  Ducal  Palace, 
St.  Mark's,  and  other  buildings,  made  exact  drawings, 
measurements,  and  copious  notes,  and  sought  to  make 
out  by  original  research  the  dates,  sources,  and  origin 
of  each  fragment — the  capitals,  balustrades,  colonnades 
— literally  the  stones^  not  the  buildings,  of  Venice. 


68  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

He  remained  working  in  Venice  the  four  months  of 
-winter,  and  returned  in  the  spring  of  1850  to  write  the 
first  volume  and  to  prepare  the  illustrations.  For 
these  illustrations  he  employed  some  of  the  most 
accomplished  engravers  of  the  English  school  before 
its  decline  into  photographic  reproduction.  These 
exquisite  pieces  are  still  in  great  demand,  and  add  to 
the  bibliographic  value  of  the  first  edition.  Ruskin 
personally  superintended  all  these  engravings  from  his 
own  sketches,  working  them  up  to  the  highest  point  of 
perfection,  again  and  again  having  fresh  touches  and 
delicate  shades  introduced.  He  founded,  in  truth,  a 
real  school  of  engravers,  which,  in  spite  of  its  excessive 
refinement,  will  always  be  an  honour  to  English  art. 
And  his  own  part,  as  author  of  the  original  designs, 
also  as  chief  master  of  the  school  which  reproduced 
them,  entitles  him  to  be  considered  as  the  real  creator 
of  these  fascinating  pieces  in  their  final  form  of 
engravings. 

Working  mainly  in  London — where  he  now  lived  in 
Park  Street,  and  was  even  to  be  seen  in  society  and  at 
court — Ruskin  brought  out  the  first  volume  of  the 
Stones  of  Venice  early  in  1851.  In  spite  of  the  indigna- 
tion of  architects  and  critics  not  a  few,  the  book  was 
received  with  applause,  and  undoubtedly  raised  his  re- 
putation Avith  the  world.  Of  course,  it  stirred  a  cloud  of 
controversies,  which  fastened  on  the  social  and  industrial 
heresies  of  the  new  prophet  as  well  as  on  his  artistic 
dogmas.  It  was  the  year  of  the  first  Great  Inter- 
national Exhibition,  when  Queen  Victoria  and  Prince 
Albert  called  the  world  of  Art,  Invention,  and  Labour 
to  compare  their  works  in  the  great  glass  house  that 
the  gardener,  Sir  Joseph  Paxton,  had  raised  in  Hyde 


VI.]  THE  STONES  OF  VENICE  69 

Park.  It  was  the  crucial  epoch  when  Early  Victorian 
sestheticism  first  began  to  ask  itself  whether  its  ideals 
and  forms  were  the  absolute  canons  of  taste,  if  the 
Houses  of  Parliament  and  the  Royal  Exchange  were 
the  last  word  in  building,  and  if  Maclise  and  Etty 
really  held  the  field  of  painting  against  all  rivals. 

Thomas  Carlyle,  then  a  notable  force  in  the  new 
world  that  was  opening,  hailed  the  book  with  joy. 

"  A  strange,  unexpected,  and,  I  believe,  most  true  and 
excellent  Sermon  in  Stones,  as  well  as  the  best  piece  of  school- 
mastering  in  Architectonics,  from  which  I  hope  to  learn  in  a 
great  many  ways.  The  spirit  and  purpose  of  these  critical 
studies  of  yours  are  a  singular  sign  of  the  times  to  me,  and  a 
very  gratifying  one.  Right  good  speed  to  you,  and  victorious 
arrival  on  the  farther  shore  !  It  is  a  quite  new  '  Renaissance,' 
I  believe,  we  are  getting  into  just  now  ;  either  towards  new, 
wider  manhood,  high  again  as  the  eternal  stars,  or  else  into 
final  death,  and  the  mask  of  Gehenna  for  evermore  !  " 

So  far  Sartor  ! — and  we  see  that  John  Ruskin  was  not 
the  only  writer,  in  the  middle  of  the  last  century,  who 
used  violent  language  and  nourished  big  vaticinations. 
And  Charlotte  Bronte  wrote  :  "  The  Stones  of  Venice  seem 
nobly  laid  and  chiselled.  How  grandly  the  quarry  of 
vast  marbles  is  disclosed !  Mr.  Ruskin  seems  to  me 
one  of  the  few  genuine  writers,  as  distinguished  from 
book-makers,  of  this  age."  A  just  and  clear-sighted 
thought,  worthy  of  Jane  Eyre,  with  her  way  of  seeing 
through  outward  show  to  the  soul  within  the  husk. 

In  1852  Ruskin  made  another  long  stay  in  Venice; 
and,  as  he  wrote  thence  to  the  poet  Rogers,  the  en- 
chantment of  the  city  began  to  wane  for  him ;  and  he 
wishes  that  it  may  become  at  last  a  ruin  rather  than  a 
modern  Frenchified  town.     But  he  pushed  on  with  his 


LlfOg^'"^ 


70  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

book,  having  left  Park  Street  for  Heme  Hill ;  and  at 
last,  early  in  1853,  the  Stones  of  Venice  was  completed, 
and  the  second  and  third  volumes  published  by  Smith 
and  Elder. 

The  Stones  of  Venice,  we  have  seen,  was  designed  as 
a  concrete  expansion  of  the  Seven  Lamps — to  give 
historical  and  material  proof  of  the  intimate  reaction 
of  a  noble  type  of  public  and  private  life  on  the  edifices 
erected  by  the  nation  it  inspired.  It  is  less  fanciful 
than  the  Seven  Lamps,  less  discursive,  much  less  dis- 
figured by  rhetoric,  less  combative,  and  yet  quite  as 
resolute  in  purpose.  The  book  is  thus  the  most 
coherent  and  organic  of  all  Euskin's  larger  works,  and 
in  its  main  aim — to  draw  attention  to  the  unique 
merits  of  Venetian  buildings  and  to  protest  against  the 
fashionable  imitation  of  Palladian  buildings — it  must  be 
pronounced  to  have  achieved  a  notable  success.  Much 
of  all  he  preached  as  to  the  slavery  of  the  modern 
workman  to  his  machines,  as  to  the  moral,  social,  and 
aesthetic  evils  of  mechanical  handiwork,  as  to  the 
dreariness  of  the  conventional  imitation  of  woods  and 
marbles,  as  to  the  monotony  of  perpendicular  traceries 
and  debased  triglyphs,  has  been  burnt  into  the  minds 
of  our  generation. 

One  of  the  most  remarkable  eifects  of  his  study  has 
been  the  interest  he  has  aroused  in  Byzantine  archi- 
tecture— the  real  parent  of  Venetian — 3k  style  which 
our  age  is  much  more  inclined  to  study  and  adapt  than 
it  is  inclined  to  study  and  adapt  the  Venetian  models 
proper.  It  is  not  apparent  that  Ruskin  at  all  under- 
stood the  real  relation  of  the  buildings  and  arts  he 
found  at  Venice  to  their  true  sources  in  the  Byzantine 
school  and  in  Greek  invention.     The  half  century  that 


VI.]  THE  STONES  OF  VENICE  71 

has  passed  since  lie  wrote  has  thrown  a  flood  of  light 
upon  the  history  of  Byzantine  art  and  its  far-radiating 
influence  on  all  forms  of  art  in  the  West.  It  is  a 
remarkable  instance  of  Ruskin's  genius  that,  long  before 
the  special  studies  in  Southern  Italy  and  the  Mediter- 
ranean seaboard  which  have  given  us  so  much  new 
information,  he  does  seem  to  have  said  nothing 
which  the  later  studies  have  disproved,  if,  indeed,  he 
does  not  seem  from  time  to  time  implicitly  to  have  felt 
the  truth. 
<  The  fine  enthusiasm  with  which  again  and  again 
in  the  Stones  of  Venice  Ruskin  pleads  the  cause  of  the 
freedom  of  the  workman  from  the  degrading  monotony 
of  mechanical  repetition,  has  had  indirect  effects  far 
and  wide,  in  places  which  are  not  devoted  to  debate 
architectural  styles.  It  is  the  obvious  introduction  to 
his  second  career  of  Socialist  reformer,  which  began 
eight  or  ten  years  later ;  and  it  is  the  conclusive  proof 
that  one  dominant  idea  inspired  Ruskin's  entire  work 
— from  Modern  Painters  to  the  last  letter  in  Fors — the 
idea  that  all  high  art  is  the  production  of  a  faithful 
and  virtuous  age;  that  religion,  justice,  and  good 
order  are  the  roots  of  which  the  fine  arts  are  but  the 
flowers. 

Unluckily,  in  the  very  act  of  proving  to  the  world 
that  all  great  art  is  essentially  religious,  John  Ruskin 
proved  to  himself  that  the  Puritan  type  of  religion  in 
which  he  had  been  trained,  and  which  he  fervently 
believed  till  the  full  age  of  manhood,  would  not  stand 
the  test ;  and  when  he  began  to  modify  and  recast  it, 
he  found  himself  naturally  in  very  deep  waters.  Writ- 
ing from  Venice  in  1877  {Fors,  Ixxvi.),  he  goes  so  far 
as  to  say  that  "the  religious  teaching  of  those  books, 


72  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

and  all  the  more  for  the  sincerity  of  it,  is  misleading 
— sometimes  even  poisonous;  always,  in  a  manner, 
ridiculous."  This,  as  usual,  is  rather  too  violent.  It 
was  no  doubt  written  at  a  time  of  excitement ;  but  it 
is  republished  in  the  authorised  edition  of  1896.  It  is 
true  that  in  the  decline  of  his  mental  stamina,  Ruskin 
emerged  from  the  theological  darkness  in  which  he 
groped  through  middle  life  into  a  rather  vague  lorm 
of  orthodox  belief.  But  it  is  significant  that  a  great 
book,  written  to  prove  that  all  high  art  is  produced 
only  by  "  fidelity  to  the  legible  laws  of  an  undoubted 
God,"  is  declared  by  its  author,  at  the  close  of  his 
career,  to  be  based  on  religious  teaching  w^hich  he  now 
finds  to  be  misleading,  poisonous,  and  ridiculous. 

This  goes  very  deep  down  to  the  radical  defects  of 
Ruskin's  entire  teaching.  He  undertook  to  found  a 
comprehensive  scheme  of  the  imaginative  faculties  on 
a  creed  which  he  had  imbibed  as  a  child  and  held  with 
childlike  fervour,  without  any  solid  study  of  its  philo- 
sophy, or  its  history,  or  its  social  fruits.  When  all 
this  was  forced  on  him  by  the  prophetic  homilies  of 
Thomas  Carlyle,  and  by  the  facts  of  society  and  art 
he  -witnessed  in  CathoHc  countries,  and  which  he  learned 
about  Catholic  ages,  his  rapid  imagination  and  his 
sympathetic  nature  took  fire  and  tore  ojQf,  as  did  Sartor 
himself,  "the  rags  of  Houndsditch, "  as  Carlyle  called 
the  Biblical  orthodoxy  of  his  youth.  As  in  theology, 
so  in  history ;  as  in  art,  so  in  economics,  Ruskin  was 
perpetually  constructing  a  priori  out  of  his  own  head 
new  schemes  and  theories,  without  any  serious  or 
systematic  knowledge  of  theology  or  history,  or 
economics,  or  even  art. 

But  having  said  this,  let  us  never  forget  that  John 


VI.]  THE  STONES  OF  VENICE  73 

Euskin  was  a  man  of  rare  genius,  of  what  one  of  his 
French  admirers  has  called  "a  palpitating  imagina- 
tion," and  withal  he  was  a  man  of  delicate  moral 
sensitiveness,  of  acute  human  sympathy  and  vision. 
He  had  some  share  of  that  Gift  of  the  Ithuriel  spear 
by  which  frauds  are  detected,  which  enabled  men  with 
such  different  spirits  as  Plato,  St.  John,  and  the 
Mystics,  or  Burke,  or  Shelley,  to  give  us  wondrous 
hints  and  guesses,  beautiful  consolations  and  hopes, 
even  in  their  fancies,  their  paradoxes,  and  their 
illusions. 

All  that  genius  and  insight  could  do  without  sys- 
tematic learning  or  patient  reasoning,  that  John  Ruskin 
did.  From  the  point  of  view  of  a  scientific  historian, 
it  would  need  long  years,  not  a  few  crowded  months, 
to  master  the  history  of  Venice,  much  less  that  of 
Italy,  for  the  whole  Middle  Ages.  A  serious  archae- 
ologist would  spend  as  many  years  as  Ruskin  could 
give  of  months  to  unearth  all  the  seaweed-overladen 
and  buried  antiquities  of  St.  Mark's,  and  the  palaces 
of  the  Grand  Canal.  A  man  who  knew  little  of  theo- 
logy except  the  Bible  and  the  volumes  of  sermons 
that  were  admitted  into  a  strict  Calvinist  house- 
hold, was  not  equipped  to  lecture  Auguste  Comte, 
Mill,  Buckle,  and  Herbert  Spencer  alx)ut  the  evolution 
of  civilisation  or  the  history  of  religion.  Nor  was  it 
quite  decent  to  mock  at  tlie  economists  from  Adam 
Smith  to  Henry  Sidgwick  with  no  more  knowledge 
of  their  books  than  has  any  aesthetic  curate  in  deacon's 
orders.  He  never  could  be  brought  to  understand 
this.  His  education  in  a  kind  of  Puritan  nursery,  and 
the  hard  shell  of  egoism  in  which  his  whole  early  life 
was  cribbed,    made   this   impossible.      And   so,    John 


74  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap, 

Kuskin  went  forth  to  take  up  his  parable  against  them 
all — artists,  critics,  historians,  philosophers,  theologians, 
and  economists,  with  all  the  fervour  and  devotion  of 
an  early  Christian  martyr  in  the  Roman  Empire — and 
Avith  the  same  result.  He  lived  through  a  long  life 
of  contempt,  and  almost  of  persecution.  But  there 
was  something  in  what  he  preached  that  has  lived — • 
which  philosophers,  theologians,  and  economists  never 
could  altogether  supply. 

Although  the  Stones  of  Venice  is  less  fanciful,  less 
discursive,  less  rhetorical,  and  less  combative  than 
Modern  Painters  or  the  Seven  Lamj)S,  this  is  only  in  a 
matter  of  degree  and  by  comparison.  There  is  plenty 
of  fantasy,  excursion,  rhetoric,  and  combat  in  the  book. 
But  it  may  be  called  the  most  organic  and  coherent 
work  of  a  man  who  openly  scoffed  at  things  organic  and 
coherent.  It  had,  of  course,  descriptions  of  scenes  and 
places  not  a  few — some  of  them  as  true  and  beautiful  as 
anything  that  Euskin  ever  wrote.  No  man  can  forget 
that  exordium  in  the  first  chapter  of  the  second  volume 
of  the  Stones  on  the  first  approach  to  Venice — a  piece 
overcharged  indeed  with  colour  and  overcrowded  with 
words — but  how  true,  how  impressive!  The  salt- 
breeze  of  the  open  lagoon ;  the  white  moaning  sea-birds ; 
the  masses  of  black  weed;  the  sun  declining  behind 
the  belfry  tower  of  the  lonely  island  church,  "St. 
George  of  the  Seaweed  " ;  the  hills  of  Arqua  in  a  dark 
cluster  of  purple  pyramids ;  the  chain  of  the  Alps 
girding  the  northern  horizon;  a  wall  of  jagged  blue, 
vv'ith  here  and  there  a  wilderness  of  misty  precipices 
seen  through  its  clefts ;  then  the  shadowy  Rialto  as 
it  throws  its  colossal  curve  slowly  forth  from  behind 
the  palace  of  the  Camerlenghi,  so  delicate,  so  adaman- 


VI.]  THE  STONES  OF  VENICE  75 

tine,  strong  as  a  mountain  cavern,  graceful  as  a  bow 
just  bent;  and  then  the  boat  darts  forth  upon  the 
breadth  of  silver  sea— the  Ducal  Palace,  flushed  with 
its  sanguine  veins,  looking  to  the  snowy  palace  of  Our 
Lady  of  Salvation.  Yes !  we  know  it  well.  All  this 
is  a  "  purple  patch  "  of  redundant  rhetoric.  True  !  but 
he  who  wrote  it  out  felt  Venice  to  move  him  so.  We, 
too,  feel  it  move  us.     And  we  cannot  forget  it. 

1  am  wont  to  recall  that  comparison  between  St. 
Mark's  and  a  quiet  English  cathedral  in  the  fourth 
chapter  of  the  second  volume  as  one  of  the  most  subtly 
felt  and  mellow  landscapes  in  words  in  all  our  litera- 
ture. How  exquisitely  touched  in  are  "the  small 
formalisms  mixed  with  its  serene  sublimity"  in  the 
Cathedral  Close  —  its  secluded,  continuous,  drowsy 
felicities,  and  the  influence  of  those  dark  towers  on 
all  who  have  passed  through  the  lonely  square  for 
centuries,  and  on  all  who  have  seen  them  rising  far 
away  over  the  wooded  plain.  And,  then,  we  pass  on 
to  the  crowded  and  resonant  alleys  round  St.  Mark's, 
with  all  their  colour,  lamps,  virgins,  and  confusion  of 
balconies,  pergolas,  and  awnings,  till  the  vision  of 
St.  Mark's  opens  on  us — a  multitude  of  pillars  and 
white  domes ;  a  treasure-heap,  partly  of  gold,  and  partly 
of  opal  and  mother-of-pearl;  and  five  great  vaulted 
porches,  ceiled  with  fair  mosaic,  and  beset  ^vith  sculpture 
of  alabaster,  clear  as  amber  and  delicate  as  ivory.  True  ! 
it  is  all  overcharged  like  a  banquet  scene  by  Kubens ! 
But  how  vividly  is  it  seen ;  how  deeply  is  it  felt ! 

And  then  the  tomb  of  Doge  Andrea  Dandolo  in  the 
Baptistery  of  St.  Mark's  (vol.  ii.)  and  the  tomb  of  Can 
Grande  at  Verona  (vol.  iii.) !  Has  any  solemn  monu- 
ment ever  been  presented  to  our  memories  with  pathos 


76  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

so  true  and  painting  so  real  ?  Tens  of  thousands  go 
yearly  to  look  on  them  from  what  Ruskin  tells  them, 
who  would  have  passed  otherwise  with  an  incurious 
glance  and  a  sentence  from  the  guide-book.  And,  of 
course,  though  he  intends  to  stick  close  to  his  subject 
— the  Stones  of  Venice — there  is  a  great  deal  about 
painting,  Fra  Angelico  the  Florentine,  Rubens  the 
Fleming,  who  are  exalted  to  the  skies,  and  about 
Murillo  the  Spaniard,  and  Salvator  Rosa,  the  South 
Italian,  who  are  denounced  as  men  who  sought  plea- 
sure in  what  is  horrible  and  disgusting.  And  all  this 
to  explain  the  Stones  of  Venice.  But  such  is  our 
author's  way ;  and  for  all  its  circumvolutions,  it  is  a 
very  fascinating  way,  and  deeply  suggestive  even  in 
its  eccentricities  and  its  illusions. 

There  is  much  fine  moral  and  social  edification  in 
the  book  too  !  All  that  he  tells  us  how  the  life  and 
work  of  the  actual  worker  is  after  all  the  essence  of 
Art;  the  scorn  that  he  pours  on  the  pitiful  tricks  of 
imitating  the  grain  of  fine  wood  and  marble  on  plaster 
and  deal  boards ;  the  meaning  of  education  as  distinct 
from  the  cramming  in  of  information ;  the  teaching  as 
to  true  and  false  ornament,  as  to  variety  in  ornament, 
as  to  the  dignity  of  pure  colour — this  and  a  thousand 
other  suggestions  make  it,  as  Carlyle  truly  said,  a 
sermon  in  stones. 

In  the  sixth  chapter  of  the  second  volume  is  a 
passage  about  the  mental  slavery  of  modern  workmen 
which  may  be  said  to  be  the  creed,  if  it  be  not  the  origin, 
of  a  new  industrial  school  of  thought.  It  is  as  powerful 
in  expression  as  it  is  elevated  in  conception. 

"  Men  may  be  beaten,  chained,  tormented,  yoked  like 
cattle,  slaughtered  like  summer  flies,  and  yet  remain  in  one 


vi.]  THE  STONES  OF  VENICE  77 

sense,  and  the  best  sense,  free.  But  to  smother  their  souls 
within  them,  to  blight  and  hew  into  rotting  pollards  the 
suckling  branches  of  their  human  intelligence,  to  make  the 
flesh  and  skin,  which,  after  the  worm's  work  on  it,  is  to  see 
God,  into  leathern  thongs  to  yoke  machinery  with, — this  is  to 
be  slave-masters  indeed  ;  and  there  might  be  more  freedom  in 
England,  though  her  feudal  lord's  lightest  words  were  worth 
men's  lives,  and  though  the  blood  of  the  vexed  husbandman 
dropped  in  the  furrows  of  her  fields,  than  there  is  while  the 
animation  of  her  multitudes  is  sent  like  fuel  to  feed  the  factory 
smoke,  and  the  strength  of  them  is  given  daily  to  be  wasted 
into  the  fineness  of  a  web,  or  racked  into  the  exactness  of  a 
Hne." 

This  is  to  wander  far  from  the  Palaces  of  Venice. 
But  it  is  to  come  very  close  to  the  Social  Democracy  of 
to-day. 


CHAPTEE   Yll 

SOCIETY — CRITICISM — LECTURING 

The  period  of  Ruskin's  life  between  the  completion 
of  the  first  volume  of  the  Stones  of  Venice  and  the 
articles  entitled  Unto  this  Last  (1851-1860)  was  a  time 
of  varied  activity  and  of  many  publications  and  in- 
cidents in  his  career.  His  father  collected  his  FoemSy 
a  work  now  in  greater  esteem  at  book  sales  than  with 
the  higher  criticism,  as  we  have  already  noted.  And 
in  1851  he  also  suffered  to  be  published  The  King  of 
tlie  Golden  Biver,  which  ten  years  before  he  had  written 
to  amuse  Euphemia  Gray  in  her  childhood.  It  was 
illustrated  by  Doyle,  and  had  a  great  success.  He 
now  lived  in  London,  and  went  not  a  little  into  society 
— visiting  Samuel  Rogers,  Lord  and  Lady  Mount 
Temple,  Lord  Houghton,  Thomas  Carlyle,  Frederick 
D.  Maurice,  the  Marshalls  of  Leeds,  Lady  Davy,  and 
Dr.  Whewell,  the  Master  of  Trinity  College,  Cambridge. 
He  was  no  doubt  never  at  home  in  London  society, 
but  he  met  from  time  to  time  those  who  became  his 
friends  through  life.  Mr.  Colling  wood  has  printed  a 
private  and  humorous  letter  to  his  mother,  which  is 
worthy  of  Dickens  : — 

"  My  dearest  Mother, — Horrible  party  last  night — stiff 
— large  —  dull  —  fidgety — strange — run-against-everybody  — 
know-nobody  sort  of  party.      Naval  people.      Young  lady 
78 


CHAP.  VII.]       SOCIETY— CRITICISM— LECTURING        79 

claims  acquaintance  with  me — I  know  as  much  of  her  as  of 
Queen  Pomare— Talk :  get  away  as  soon  as  I  can — ask  who 

she  is — Lady ;  as  wise  as  I  was  before.     Introduced  to  a 

black  man  with  chin  in  collar.  Black  man  condescending — I 
abuse  different  things  to  black  man  :  chiefly  the  House  of 
Lords.  Black  man  says  he  lives  in  it— asks  where  I  live — 
don't  want  to  tell  him — obliged— go  away  and  ask  who  he  is 

_( ) ;  as  wise  as  I  was  before.     Introduced  to  a  young 

lady — young  lady  asks  if  I  like  drawing — go  away  and  ask 

who  she  is— Lady  ( ).     Keep  away  with  back  to  wall  and 

look  at  watch.  Get  away  at  last.  Very  sulky  this  morning 
—hope  my  father  better — dearest  love  to  you  both." 

And  the  letter  to  his  father  about  a  drawing-room 
presentation  at  Buckingham  Palace  (May  1850)  is 
almost  as  lively  : — 

"  The  most  awkward  crush  I  ever  saw  in  my  life — the  pit 
at  the  Surrey  may  perhaps  show  the  like — nothing  else.  The 
floor  was  covered  with  the  ruins  of  ladies'  dresses,  torn  lace, 
and  fallen  flowers.  .  .  .  The  Queen  gave  her  hand  very 
graciously,  but  looked  bored.  Poor  thing  !  well  she  might  be, 
with  about  a  quarter  of  a  mile  square  of  people  to  bow  to." 

He  now  broke  out  in  a  new  place,  with  a  pamphlet 
on  Church  organisation.  Notes  on  the  Construction  of 
Sheep/olds  was  not  a  practical  manual  of  husbandry,  as 
some  Northern  farmers  took  it  to  be,  and  complained 
that  they  had  been  trapped  into  buying  it  by  the  title. 
It  was  a  religious  appeal  to  High  Anglicans  and  strict 
Presbyterians  to  find  a  modus  vivendi  in  a  new  Eirenikon 
— "one  fold  and  one  Shepherd" — the  Anglican  to 
abate  his  sacerdotal  pretensions,  and  the  Presbyterian 
no  longer  to  stickle  about  the  title  of  the  Christian 
Overseer.  The  pamphlet,  for  all  its  kindly  advice,  did 
not  accomplish  the  re-union  of  Protestant  persuasions ; 
and  the  benevolent  herald  of  peace  was  astonished  to 


80  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

find  how  much  deeper  theological  and  ecclesiastical 
polemics  could  cut  into  men's  beliefs  than  ever  had 
been  dreamed  of  in  the  placid  philosophy  of  Heme 
Hill.  It  was  not  many  years  before  he  greatly  en- 
larged his  own  philosophy  of  religion,  and  saw  that  any 
final  Eirenikon  must  be  based  on  the  Brotherhood  of 
Man. 

In  1851  Euskin  took  up  the  defence  of  the  new 
movement  in  painting — that  of  the  Pre-Raphaelite 
Brethren — and  wrote  the  pamphlet  Pre-Raphaelitism. 
The  movement  originated  with  Holman  Hunt  and 
D.  G.  Rossetti,  who  were  joined  by  Millais  and 
Burne-JoneSj  and  undoubtedly  made  a  new  departure 
in  English  painting.  The  pamphlet  was  a  vehement 
argument  that  the  new  school  had  the  same  desire  for 
truth  in  natural  facts,  for  realism  in  presentation,  and 
pure  colour  that  were  to  be  found  in  Turner,  in  the 
painters  praised  in  Modern  PaiiUerSi  as  in  the  Primitives 
of  mediaeval  Italy.  There  was  substantial  truth  in 
this  eloquent  defence.  Much  came  of  it,  as  soon  as 
men  of  original  genius  shook  themselves  free  of  any 
formulas  of  art,  and  developed  their  own  gifts  in  their 
own  way.  And  the  misguided  sect  which  fancied  that 
art  could  be  regenerated  by  a  decalogue  of  new 
conventions  to  be  extracted  from  Ruskinian  literature, 
conventions  as  unnatural  and  as  narrowing  as  the 
current  conventions  of  the  academies,  gradually  sank 
into  obscurity  and  public  indifference. 

It  was  a  time  of  the  losses  of  friends.  Turner  died, 
December  1851,  and  made  Ruskin  one  of  his  executors, 
an  office  which  he  renounced.  And  then  went  William 
Hunt  and  Samuel  Prout.  Charles  Newton  would 
have  taken  Ruskin  with  him  to  Greece,  where  he  was 


VII.]  SOCIETY— CRITICISM— LECTURING  81 

making  researches;  but  the  parents  would  not  suffer 
their  John  to  venture  his  person  on  so  perilous  a 
voyage,  especially  as  it  was  to  be  made  in  a  new- 
fangled steamship.  It  may  indeed  be  doubted  if 
Athens  would  have  pleased  him  as  much  as  Venice. 
But  great  things  might  have  followed  if  he  had  ever 
seen  Constantinople  and  the  mountains  of  the  Greek 
continent  and  the  ^gean  Sea. 

In  1853  Ruskin  began  that  valuable  series  of  notes 
for  the  Arundel  Society,  explaining  the  Giotto  frescoes 
in  the  Arena  Chapel  at  Padua.  This  is  a  delightful 
book  (now  reprinted  with  additions,  1890).  I  know 
nothing  of  Buskin's  more  admirable  and  more  valuable 
than  this  sympathetic  estimate  of  Giotto's  marvellous 
genius  and  romantic  life,  vnth.  these  brief,  vivid, 
and  strictly  historic  notes  on  Giotto's  compositions. 
One  of  the  best  services  that  Ruskin  has  rendered  to 
the  history  of  art  is  the  full  appreciation  of  Giotto  and 
his  profound  reaction  en  the  evolution  of  Florentine 
art.  Always  vehement  in  his  praise,  Ruskin  has  not 
said  a  word  too  much  for  Giotto.  Giotto  is  one  of  the 
few  artists  towards  whom,  in  his  long  career  as  a  critic 
for  forty  years  in  varying  opinions  and  moods,  Ruskin 
never  permits  himself  to  utter  a  word  of  disparagement. 
He  returns  to  him  again  and  again.  Fors  is  full  of 
Giotto.  He  compares  Giotto  to  Dante,  and  quite  truly ; 
for  of  all  the  painters  of  the  world  none,  unless  it  be 
Leonardo  and  Michael  Angelo,  give  such  signs  of  intel- 
lectual power  as  Giotto.  He  is  free  from  the  morbid 
and  restless  spirit  which  places  those  mighty  natures  in 
a  world  apart.  And  the  influence  exerted  by  Giotto 
on  his  own  and  succeeding  generations  was  both  greater 
and  more  wholesome  than  was  that  of  Leonardo  or  of 

F 


82  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

Michael  Angelo.  Giotto  was  the  most  profound,  the 
most  humane,  the  soundest  and  most  balanced  intellect 
in  the  entire  history  of  modern  art.  "  Or  a  ha  Giotto  il 
grido  " — as  he  had  in  the  ages  of  Dante. 

This  Ruskin  was  the  first  to  teach  us.  His  estimate 
of  Giotto's  compositions  is  based  on  a  sympathetic  but 
jiot  a  servile  understanding  of  the  apocryphal  Gospels 
current  in  the  fourteenth  century,  and  the  quaint  and 
beautiful  legends  of  the  Virgin's  life.  E-uskin  enters 
into  all  this  in  the  same  spirit  that  we  can  conceive 
Giotto  to  have  used  towards  the  myths :  penetrated 
"with  their  grace,  tenderness,  and  spiritual  beauty,  fired 
with  their  power  as  material  for  painting — taking  them 
just  as  they  had  been  handed  down,  without  doubt  or 
criticism,  but  without  superstition,  and  caring  for  them 
essentially  on  their  human  and  emotional  side,  and  not 
on  their  transcendental  or  dogmatic  side.  And  Euskin, 
in  his  notes  on  these  compositions,  touches  with  a  sure 
and  easy  hand  at  once  the  legendary,  the  dramatic,  and 
the  artistic  side  of  each  fresco.  Nothing  can  be  more 
true  and  suggestive  than  the  few  strokes  in  which  he 
shows  us  "Joachim  retiring  to  the  Sheepfold,"  a  work 
of  marvellous  dramatic  pathos,  recalling  in  its  severe 
dignity  an  Athenian  tombstone  from  the  Cerameicos ; 
or  again,  the  "Angel  appearing  to  Anna,"  "The 
Meeting  at  the  Golden  Gate,"  "The  Virgin  returning 
to  her  House,"  "The  Annunciation,"  "The  Salutar- 
tion,"  "The  Entombment,"  and  "The  Resurrection." 
When  we  carefully  study  all  that  Euskin  has  written 
about  Giotto,  his  thought  and  his  moods,  and  his 
power  of  presenting  human  emotions,  we  come  to  rank 
Giotto  as  one  of  the  greatest  forces  in  the  entire 
history  of  art. 


vii.]  SOCIETY— CRITICISM— LECTURING  83 

In  the  same  year,  1853,  so  eventful  in  the  public 
and  private  life  of  Euskin,  he  commenced  a  new  career 
which  was  to  be  the  main  occupation  of  his  later  life. 
The  recluse  of  Heme  Hill,  the  now  illustrious  author 
of  three  magnificent  works,  the  critic  of  the  journals, 
and  the  theological  pamphleteer,  appeared  as  a  public 
lecturer  on  the  platform,  "wath  diagrams  and  illustrations 
of  his  own.  It  was  before  the  famous  Edinburgh 
Philosophical  Institution,  which  has  invited  so  many 
men  known  in  literature,  science,  and  the  public  service 
to  appear  in  its  hall,  His  acceptance  of  the  task  alarmed 
and  rather  scandalised  his  somewhat  timid,  conven- 
tional, and  suburban  parents.  His  mother  thought 
him  "too  young,"  married  man  of  thirty-four  as  he 
was;  his  father  thought  it  "degrading"  to  expose 
himself  to  newspaper  comments  and  personal  references 
There  was  more  in  the  latter  remark  than  in  the 
former,  for  the  moment  was  ill  chosen  for  a  public 
appearance,  whilst  he  was  a  party  to  a  matrimonial 
suit;  but,  of  course,  the  lectures  had  been  arranged 
many  months  before.  The  lectures  were  a  summary 
of  his  views  on  architecture  and  painting,  and  have 
been  frequently  reprinted  with  that  title.  They  were 
fiercely  assailed  by  the  conventional  critics ;  and  it 
cannot  be  said  that  they  contained  anything  not  found 
in  his  other  ^vritings,  nor  have  they  added  anything 
to  his  general  reputation.  They  are  interesting  mainly 
as  his  first  appearance  on  the  lecture  platform,  where 
for  thirty  years  he  was  to  be  heard  so  often  and  with 
such  efi'ect. 

The  follo^vnng  year  (1854)  Euskin  started  abroad 
again  with  his  parents,  with  whom  he  had  resumed  his 
old  bachelor  life  in  his  old  home.     In  two  letters  to 


84  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

the  Times  he  made  an  enthusiastic  defence  of  Holman 
Hunt's  "  Light  of  the  World  " — a  picture  which  touched 
a  special  chord  of  Christian  sentiment,  but  is  rather  a 
mediaeval  rehus  to  the  modern  man-of-the-world.  The 
party  went  to  Switzerland  again,  John  being  bound  to 
continue  Modern  Painters,  and  himself  designing  an 
illustrated  history  of  Switzerland,  which,  like  so  many 
of  his  designs,  ultimately  found  no  means  of  publication, 
except  in  the  later  volumes  of  Modern  Painters. 

In  1854  Frederick  Denison  Maurice,  along  with 
Dr.  Fumivall,  Thomas  Hughes,  and  Charles  Kingsley, 
founded  the  Working  Men's  College,  which  still 
flourishes  in  Great  Ormond  Street  in  London.  It 
was  the  pioneer  of  a  movement  which  has  gro^ni 
largely  and  with  such  good  results.  The  idea  of  the 
College  was  to  offer  workmen  and  others  who  could 
not  take  advantage  of  the  higher  education  open  to 
the  wealthy  as  much  of  the  best  academic  training  as 
could  be  given  in  evening  classes,  but  to  combine  this 
teaching  with  a  real  esprit  de  corps  as  developed  in 
English  schools  and  colleges,  based  on  the  fellowship 
of  citizens  and  the  union  of  social  orders.  The  idea 
sprang  from  the  Chartist  movement  of  1848  and  the 
new  school  of  Christian  Socialists,  and  was  the 
eminently  British  and  Anglican  form  taken  by  the 
revolutionary  and  socialist  stir  in  Europe  from  1840 
to  1850.  Carlyle's  Sartor,  Kingsley 's  Alton  Locke, 
Hug-hes's  Tom  Bromn,  and  Maurice's  Broad  Church 
Sermons  were  the  literary  forms  of  the  new  idea — a 
cultured,  orderly,  respectable  type  of  Social  Democracy. 

The  College  has  thriven  and  grown  under  the  suc- 
cessive direction  of  Maurice,  Hughes,  Sir  John  Lubbock, 
and  Professor  Albert  Dicey  ;  it  has  had  amongst  its 


VII.]  SOCIETY— CRITICISM— LECTURING  85 

teachers,  students,  and  friends  a  crowd  of  men  known 
in  literature,  politics,  and  the  public  service.  It  has 
been  the  parent  of  a  long  brood  of  colleges  and 
societies  more  or  less  like  it  in  purpose, — Toynbee 
Halls,  Women's  Colleges,  Passmore  Edwards  Halls, 
"  University  Settlements,"  Newton  Hall,  and  now  the 
University  Extension  movement,  all  of  them  being 
attempts  to  bring  the  best  training  of  our  universities 
and  schools  to  those  whose  business  and  resources 
prevent  them  from  entering  the  courses  of  the  higher 
education;  and  withal  to  bring  together  the  classes 
into  which  our  modern  English  society  is  stiffly  divided, 
in  a  common  social  life  and  the  pursuit  of  culture 
higher  than  that  of  the  current  business  of  the  day. 

Into  this  effort,  which  so  deeply  corresponded  with 
Buskin's  own  views — one  indeed  which  had  largely 
sprung  from  his  own  suggestions — Ruskin  threw  him- 
self with  enthusiasm,  giving  his  time,  money,  and 
advice  with  generous  freedom.  Together  with  Rossetti 
and  Hunt,  and  eventually  \v^.th  Burne- Jones  and 
W.  Morris,  he  devoted  his  evenings  to  teach  drawing, 
and  indeed  much  else.  He  there  founded  a  school  of 
draughtsmen,  copyists,  and  engravers,  which  has  grown 
and  carried  out  his  methods  with  signal  success.  He 
made  friends  there  such  as  George  Allen,  who  became 
his  pubHsher,  agent,  and  business  manager,  and  for 
four  years  his  teaching  and  enthusiasm  contributed 
largely  to  the  success  of  the  College.  I  was  myself 
one  of  the  lecturers  there  about  the  same  time ;  and 
I  had  abundant  reason  to  know  the  inspiring  effort  . 
Ruskin  gave  to  students  and  teachers  alike  by  his  ' 
sympathetic  ardour. 

Ruskin  has  himself  given  us  in  Frceierita  (iii.  13)  an 


86  JOHN  RUSKm  [chap. 

account  of  his  own  relations  to  the  College — how  he 
loved  Frederick  Maurice,  as  did  every  one  who  came 
near  him,  but  found  him  "  by  nature  puzzle-headed ; 
and,  though  in  a  beautiful  manner,  wrong-hesided,  while 
his  clear  conscience  and  keen  affection  made  him  ego- 
tistic." Elsewhere  he  says  that  Maurice  reconciled 
Biblical  difficulties  by  turning  them  the  other  side  up, 
like  railroad  cushions.  This  is  an  exact  account  of 
Maurice's  influence,  as  we  who  listened  to  his  sermons 
and  sat  in  conference  with  him  used  to  feel.  His 
moral  earnestness  and  keen  sympathies  with  right  and 
wrong  animating  one  of  the  most  illogical  and  self- 
contradictory  minds  ever  met,  combined  to  disturb, 
not  to  guide  the  beliefs  of  inquiring  youth.  And,  as 
Ruskin  and  many  of  us  felt,  the  College  had  neither 
head,  nor  system,  nor  principles,  but  went  on  with 
kindly,  social,  loose,  and  highly  respectable  orthodox 
ideas  in  religion  and  in  politics.  It  grew  into  a  very 
superior  Mechanics'  Institute,  well  supported  and  of  a 
most  useful  practical  kind;  but  not,  in  any  special 
sense,  Christian,  and  not,  in  any  sense,  Socialist,  and 
with  a  minimum  of  the  real  working  man. 

In  1857,  as  a  summary  of  his  teaching  in  drawing, 
Ruskin  published  the  Elements  of  Drawing,  a  little 
manual  which  had  an  immense  success  with  the  public ; 
but  which  he  subsequently  tried  to  suppress  or  to 
supersede  as  imperfect  and  based  on  one  serious  error 
— the  advice  not  to  begin  by  drawing  in  outline. 
The  author — who,  we  may  remember,  never  regarded 
anything  he  did  or  wrote  as  quite  conclusive  and 
sufficient — was  far  from  being  altogether  content  with 
this  volume,  -which  was  never  intended  to  be  used  by 
artists  as  a  manual,  and  was  designed  to  train  young 


VII.]  SOCIETY-CRITICISM— LECTURING  87 

persons  in  the  art  of  studying  nature  and  observing 
natural  facts  rather  than  to  train  them  in  the  art  of 
drawing.    In  a  subject  so  complex  and  subtle,  of  course 
all  kinds  of  criticism  have  been  made,  as  they  may  be 
made   about   any  guide   to   drawing.     But   from   the 
literary  point  of  view,  the  book  is  a  masterpiece  of  lucid, 
simple,  apt  expression  in  a  subject  of  practical  handling 
most  difficult  to  explain  with  clearness.     The  result  is 
that  this  little  volume  of  three  hundred  pages,  \vritten 
to  guide  beginners  how  to  look  at  things  they  want  to 
draw,  is  delightful  to  the  general  reader,  who  may  care 
nothing  at  all  for  drawing  as  an  art,  and  may  never 
wish  to  take  a  pencil  in  his  hand.     Such  is  the  magic 
of   style.     And   those  who  fancy  that   Ruskin   could 
write  only  in  turgid  tropes  and  sesquipedalian  descants, 
should  take  up  this  charming  little  series  of  letters  to 
"My  Dear   Reader,"  with  its  graceful,  naive,  simple 
directions,  and  learn,  as  the  Preface  tells  him,  that  "  the 
best  drawing-masters  are  the  woods  and  the  hills." 

Another    delightful    little    book,    the    Harbours    of 
England,  had  been  already  published  in  1856.     It  con- 
tained that  glorious  hymn  to  the  sea  and  to  seafaring 
which  is  one  of  the  most  rapturous  that  Ruskin  ever 
wrote,   and  is  ever  memorable   to   all  who   love   our 
English  element  and  those  who  live  by  it  and  on  it. 
The  book  opens  with  that  wonderful  song  of  triumph  to 
the  Boat  which  I  have  elsewhere  noted  as  a  masterpiece 
of  English  literature—"  Of  all  things,  living  or  lifeless, 
upon  this  strange  earth,  there  is  but  one  which,  having 
reached  the  midterm  of  appointed  human  endurance  on 
it,  I  still  regard  with  unmitigated  amazement."     "  One 
object  there  is  still,  which  I  never  pass  without  the 
renewed  wonder  of  childhood,  and  that  is  the  bow  of  a 


88  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

boat,"  etc.  There  is  in  English  poetry,  not  even  in 
Shelley  or  in  Byron,  no  more  stirring  ode  to  the  magic 
of  the  sea  and  the  rapture  of  the  seaman.  And  then 
the  volume,  one  now  prized  at  book  sales,  as  very  rare 
and  choice,  gives  short  descriptions  of  some  twelve  of 
Turner's  plates  representing  the  harbours  of  England 
as  they  were  to  be  seen  in  the  reign  of  George  iv., 
some  eighty  years  ago,  in  the  days  of  sailing  ships, 
seventy-four  gun  men-of-war,  and  wooden  piers.  Navies 
and  Harbours  were  more  fitting  subjects  for  an  imagina- 
tive artist  then  than  they  are  to-day.  Full  of  fancy 
without  extravagance,  impressive  without  rhetoric, 
original  without  paradox,  these  subtle  notes  interpret 
Turner  in  one  of  his  best  moods  as  completely  as  the 
notes  on  Giotto  interpret  the  Arena  frescoes.  The 
"Dover,"  "Sheemess,"  "Whitby," and  "Scarborough" 
are  admirable  examples  of  insight  into  the  mind  of  an 
original  genius  like  that  of  Turner.  And  such  a  vision 
as  that  of  "Sheerness"  in  1826  is  really  a  document 
in  the  history  of  England,  now  that  the  old  Seventy- 
fours  are  become  floating  steel  fortresses,  and  a  yacht  is 
become  a  sort  of  metal  torpedo  with  two  or  three 
balloons  fixed  on  to  it. 

These  were  years  of  varied  activity.  In  1855  he 
began  the  "Notes  on  the  Pictures  of  the  Year,"  which 
caused  no  small  excitement  amongst  painters  and 
critics,  and  gave  no  small  delight  and  instruction  to 
the  public.  It  was  the  hour  of  Ruskin's  acceptance  as 
the  arbiter  of  art  with  the  world  of  culture  and  open 
mind.  Carlyle,  the  Brownings,  Coventry  Patmore, 
were  his  close  friends.  He  now  gave  frequent  lectures 
at  Museums,  Schools,  and  Literary  Institutions;  and, 
though  his  subject  was  formally  on  some  branch  of  art. 


viL]  SOCIETY— CRITICISM-LECTURING  89 

he  was  continually  turning  to  the  social  condition  of 
the  workman  and  the  practical  life  of  the  craftsman  at 
home.  In  1857  he  lectured  at  Manchester  on  "The 
Political  Economy  of  Art,"  which  is  now  included  in 
the  volume  entitled  A  Joy  for  Ever,  and  which  is 
definitely  a  part  of  his  second  career  as  a  social  re- 
former. And  he  now  undertook  the  formidable  task 
of  arranging,  selecting,  and  exhibiting  the  enormous 
mass  of  Turner's  drawings  and  studies  which  were 
bequeathed  to  the  nation.  There  were  nearly  20,000 
of  these  fragments  in  all,  crammed  into  portfolios  and 
drawers.  It  was  an  exhausting  la]x)ur  of  some  six 
months,  a  labour  which  perhaps  no  one  else  could  have 
performed  so  well.  And  Kuskin  ultimately  composed  a 
catalogue  of  the  whole  series  of  drawings  and  sketches. 

All  through  1858  and  1859  he  was  constantly 
lecturing  up  and  down  the  country,  working  at  Oxford 
and  at  Cambridge,  aiding  to  start  the  University 
Extension,  and  to  decorate  the  new  Museum  at 
Oxford,  preaching  the  new  Gospel  of  art  labour  at 
Manchester,  at  Bradford,  and  Cambridge ;  each  lecture 
becoming  more  definitely  imbued  with  his  growing 
conviction  that  Art  in  all  its  forms  was  but  a  mani- 
festation of  a  sound  personal  and  social  life — that  the 
life  of  the  body  politic  was  the  dominant  problem  for 
us  all. 

And  so,  labouring  incessantly  at  home  and  abroad, 
he  finished  his  Modern  Painters,  of  which  the  fifth 
volume  appeared  in  1860. 

And  here,  at  the  age  of  forty,  comes  the  great 
change  in  Euskin's  career — 

"  Nel  mezzo  del  cammin  di  nostra  vita 
Mi  ritrovai  in  una  selva  oscura." 


90  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap.  vii. 

For  more  than  twenty  years  lie  had  been  battling  to 
call  men  to  honour — first,  Turner  and  his  fellows, 
Eossetti  and  his  comrades,  Giotto  and  the  Primitives, 
Titian  and  the  later  Venetians,  to  send  painters  to 
nature,  and  to  make  architects  respect  the  freedom  of 
their  workmen.  He  had  won  a  place  in  the  foremost 
ranks  of  literature,  and  had  a  great  and  growing  repu- 
tation as  writer,  as  critic,  as  teacher,  and  as  draughtsman. 
But  he  had  been  forced  by  his  intercourse  with  peasants 
abroad  and  workmen  at  home  to  feel  how  all  this  was 
naught  whilst  our  social  and  industrial  life  was  full  of 
i  sores.  And  he  retired,  as  it  were,  into  a  wilderness  to 
\meditate — "che  la  diritta  via  era  smarrita." 


CHAPTER    YIII 

AS  SOCIAL   REFORMER 

The  year  1860,  the  year  of  great  crisis  in  the  history 
of  Europe  and  of  America,  the  exact  middle  year  of 
Ruskin's  life,  with  forty  years  behind  him  and  forty 
years  yet  to  come,  was  the  year  of  the  formal  opening 
of  his  career  in  social  reform  by  the  publication  of  his 
four  essays  in  the  Cornhill  Magazine^  now  known  as 
Unto  this  Last.  When  published  as  a  volume  in  1862, 
he  characteristically  declared  these  essays  "  reprobated 
in  a  violent  manner  by  most  of  the  readers  they  met 
with,"  to  be,  not  a  whit  the  less,  "the  truest,  rightest- 
worded,  and  most  serviceable  things  I  have  ever 
written."  The  real  gist  and  aim  of  them  being  to 
give  an  accurate  and  stable  definition  of  Wealth,  and 
to  show  that  its  only  true  basis  lay  in  certain  moral 
conditions  of  society ;  in  a  word,  that  what  is  called 
Political  Economy  can  be  nothing  but  a  corollary  from 
a  complete  scheme  of  Sociology,  or  organisation  of 
human  society. 

It  so  happened  that  it  was  in  the  same  year,  1860, 
and  in  consequence  of  my  own  interest  in  these  very 
essays,  that  I  first  came  into  personal  contact  with 
Kuskin  himself.  I  had  just  been  called  to  the  Bar, 
but  found  time  to  join  the  Working  Men's  College, 
where  I  had  lectured  on  the  French  Revolution.     I 

91 


92  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

had  read  with  lively  sympathy  the  Cornhill  Essays  on 
the  fallacies  of  the  conventional  Plutonomy ;  and  being 
full  of  iiidignation  with  the  mischief  of  those  fallacies, 
I  obtained  through  Dr.  Furnivall  an  introduction  to 
Ruskin,  who  most  kindly  welcomed  me  one  Sunday 
to  the  afternoon  dinner  at  Denmark  Hill.  He  was 
then  living  with  his  father  and  mother  in  their  fine 
house,  standing  in  spacious  grounds,  and  adorned  with 
a  grand  collection  of  Turners,  Coxes,  and  Prouts.  I 
had  long  been  an  ardent  reader  of  his  lx)oks  on  Art, 
and  had  just  returned  from  a  prolonged  tour  in  North 
and  Central  Italy,  which  I  had  known  for  many  years. 
But  absorbed  as  I  was  at  that  time  in  the  great  indus- 
trial struggles,  and  being  in  close  touch  "vvith  the 
Christian  Socialists  of  that  period,  I  had  flung  myself 
with  hearty  enthusiasm  into  the  scathing  criticism  of 
Unto  this  Last.  I  thought  it  then,  as  I  think  it  still, 
"the  most  serviceable  thing"  that  Ruskin  ever  gave 
the  world. 

He  received  me  with  a  radiant  courtesy  when  I  told 
him  that  I  had  sought  him  to  hear  more  of  his  thoughts 
about  Labour  and  Wealth.  I  recall  him  as  a  man  of 
slight  figure,  rather  tall  (he  was  five  feet  ten  inches), 
except  that  he  had  a  stoop  from  the  shoulders,  with 
a  countenance  of  singular  mobility  and  expressiveness. 
His  eyes  were  blue  and  very  keen,  full  of  fire  and 
meaning;  the  hair  was  brown,  luxuriant,  and  curly; 
the  brows  rather  marked,  and  with  somewhat  shaggy 
eyebrows.  The  lips  were  full  of  movement  and  char- 
acter, in  spite  of  the  injury  caused  by  the  dog's  bite 
in  childhood.  His  countenance  was  eminently  spiriiuel 
— winning,  magnetic,  and  radiant.  I  remember  him 
then  as  he  was  drawn  in  coloured  chalks  by  G.  Rich- 


yiiij  AS  SOCIAL  REFORMER  93 

mond,  in  1857,  somewhat  idealised,  as  was  the  wont 
of  that  painter.     That  one  of  the  many  portraits  best 
recalls  to  me  the  sparkle  and  nervous  restlessness  of 
his  manhood,  and  best  conveys  the  sense  of  his  sym- 
pathetic  genius.      How    strangely   different   was   this 
portrait  at  the  age  of  thirty-eight  from  that  sombre 
photograph  by  Hollyer  in  1895  at  the  age  of  seventy- 
six,  ^^'ith  the  long  white  beard  covering  mouth  and 
cheek,  and  falling  over  the  breast  down  to  the  folded 
arms   and   clasped   hands,   mth   its   rigid   profile  and 
aquiline  nose,  as  of  a  man  of  sorro^vful  memories  and 
hopes  betrayed.     To  place  the  Eichmond  drawing  of 
1857  beside  the   Hollyer   photograph   of    1895   is  to 
measure  the  immense  changes  which   in   forty  years 
stamped  their  impress  upon  that  sensitive  soul. 

lu  1860  Ruskin  was  a  man  of  slight  but  active  figure, 
^Wth  an  air  of  genial  bonhomie,  courteous  and  playful 
in  his  ways,  inexhaustibly  vivacious  and  voluble.     He 
wore   the   famous   big  blue   neckcloth    and    the    old- 
fashioned  frock  coat  and  velvet  collar,  and  was  alto- 
gether unlike  a  gentleman-commoner  of  Christ  Church 
of  that  or  any  other  date.     He  spoke  with  a  distinct 
Scotch  burr,  especially  rolling  the  letter  r.     As  I  said 
at  the  time  of  his  death,  in  Literature,  Feb.  3,  1900 : 
"  He  was  the  very  mirror  of  courtesy,  ^nth  an  inde- 
scribable   charm   of   spontaneous   lovingness.      It  was 
neither  the  old-world  graciousness  of  Mr.  Gladstone, 
nor   the    stately  •  simplicity    of    Tourgenieff— to   name 
some  eminent  masters  of  courteous  demeanour— it  was 
simply  the  irrepressible  bubbling  up  of  a  bright  nature 
full  to  the  brim  with  enthusiasm,  chivalry,  and  affec- 
tion.    No  boy  could  blurt  out  all  that  he  enjoyed  and 
wanted  Nvith  more  artless  freedom ;  no  girl  could  be 


94  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

more  humble,  modest,  and  unassuming.  His  ideas, 
his  admiration,  and  his  fears  seemed  to  flash  out  of 
his  spirit  and  escape  his  control.  But  (in  private  life) 
it  was  always  w^hat  he  loved,  not  what  he  hated,  that 
roused  his  interest.  Now  all  this  was  extraordinary 
in  one  who,  in  writing,  treated  what  he  hated  and 
scorned  with  really  savage  violence,  who  used  such 
Vjitter  words  even  in  letters  to  his  best  friends,  who 
is  usually  charged  w^th  inordinate  arrogance  and  con- 
ceit. The  world  must  judge  his  writings  as  they 
stand.  I  can  only  say  that,  in  personal  intercourse, 
I  have  never  known  him,  in  full  health,  betrayed  into 
a  harsh  word,  or  an  ungracious  phrase,  or  an  unkind 
judgment,  or  a  trace  of  egotism.  Face  to  face,  he  was 
the  humblest,  most  willing,  and  patient  of  listeners, 
always  deferring  to  the  judgment  of  others  in  things 
wherein  he  did  not  profess  to  be  a  student,  and 
anxious  only  to  learn.  No  doubt  in  all  this  there  was 
no  little  of  Socratic  ironeia,  as  when  he  asked  me  to 
tell  him  what  Plato  had  written  about  the  order  of 
society,  and  in  which  of  his  works. 

Not  only  was  he  in  social  intercourse  one  of  the 
most  courteous  and  sweetest  of  friends,  but  he  was 
in  manner  one  of  the  most  fascinating  and  impressive 
beings  whom  I  ever  met.  I  have  talked  with  Carlyle 
and  Tennyson,  with  Victor  Hugo  and  IMazzini,  with 
Garibaldi  and  with  Gambetta,  with  John  Bright  and 
with  Eobert  Browning,  but  no  one  of  these  ever 
impressed  me  more  vividly  with  a  sense  of  intense 
personality,  with  the  inexplicable  light  of  genius  which 
seemed  to  well  up  spontaneously  from  heart  and  brain. 
It  remains  a  psychological  puzzle  how  one  who  could 
Avrite  >vith  passion  and  scorn  such  as  Carlyle  and  Byron 


TTji.]  AS  SOCIAL  REFORMER  95 

never  reached,  who  in  print  was  so  often  Athanasius 
contra  mundum,  who  opened  every  written  assertion 
with  "I  know,"  was  in  private  life  one  of  the  gentlest, 
gayest,  humblest  of  men. 

I  incline  to  think  that  the  violence  and  arrogance 
w^hich  were  imputed  to  him  came  of  a  kind  of  literary 
astru^,  which  he  never  attempted  to  control.  He  let 
himself  go,  as  perhaps  no  writer  since  Burke  ever  has 
done.  Vehement  language  was  -svith  Ruskin  a  literary 
intoxication  rather  than  a  moral  fault.  He  has  paid  a 
bitter  penalty  for  failing  to  overcome  the  tendency.  To 
paraphrase  an  absurd  epigram  about  Oliver  Goldsmith's 
talk  and  his  books,  it  might  be  said  of  Ruskin  that  he  j 
talked  like  an  angel  and  wrote  as  if  he  were  one  of  the  I 
Major  Prophets. 

The  relations  between  John  and  his  parents  were 
amongst  the  most  beautiful  things  that  dwell  in  my 
memory.  Towering  as  he  did  by  his  genius  above  his 
parents,  who  neither  understood  nor  sympathised  ^vith 
his  second  career  (dating  from  Unto  this  Last),  he 
invariably  behaved  towards  them  ^-ith  the  most  affec- 
tionate deference.  He  submitted  ^vithout  a  murmur 
to  the  rule  of  the  house,  which,  on  the  Sabbath  day, 
covered  his  beloved  Turners  with  dark  screens.  This 
man,  well  past  middle  life,  in  all  the  renown  of  his 
principal  works,  who  for  a  score  of  yeai^s  had  been  one 
of  the  chief  forces  in  the  literature  of  the  century, 
continued  to  show  an  almost  childlike  docility  towards 
his  father  and  his  mother,  respecting  their  complaints 
and  remonstrances,  and  gracefully  submitting  to  be  cor- 
rected by  their  worldly  wisdom  and  larger  experience. 
John  James  Ruskin,  the  father,  was  a  man  of  rare 
force    of   character,    shrewd,   practical,   generous,   and, 


96  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

for  all  his  conventional  and  bourgeois  prejudices,  ^vith 
sound  ideals  both  in  art  and  in  life.  With  unbounded 
trust  in  the  genius  of  his  son,  he  felt  deeply  how  much 
the  son  had  yet  to  learn.  He  would  ask  an  Oxford 
scholar  if  he  could  not  "put  John  in  the  way  of  some 
scientific  study  of  Political  Economy,"  to  doubt  which, 
in  the  old  merchant's  eyes,  was  to  be  sceptical  as  to 
Creation.  "John!  John!"  he  would  cry  out,  "what 
nonsense  you  're  talking ! "  when  John  was  off  on  one 
of  his  magnificent  paradoxes,  unintelligible  as  Pindar 
to  the  sober  Scotch  merchant.  Intellectually,  the  father 
was  the  very  antithesis  of  the  son.  He  was  strongest 
where  his  brilliant  son  was  weakest.  There  were 
moments  when  the  father  seemed  the  stronger  in 
sense,  breadth,  and  hold  on  realities.  And  when  John 
was  turned  of  forty,  the  father  still  seemed  something 
of  his  tutor,  his  guide,  his  support. 

Such  was  the  man  who,  in  the  pages  of  the  Cornhill 
I  Magazine,  then  edited  by  his  friend  Thackeray,  under- 
took, with  all  the  sublime  faith  in  himself  of  the  Knight 
I  of  La  Mancha,  to  demolish  the  solid  array  of  what  had 
held  the  field  for  two  generations  as  Political  Economy, 
i.e.   the   consolidated   and   rigid  doctrine   of   Ricardo, 
i  Malthus,   and  M'Culloch.      Ruskin's   assault  was   not 
,  quite  strictly  original.     Carlyle,   whom  he  called   his 
'  master,    had   continually   poured   forth   his   epigrams, 
isarcasm,   and  nicknames  about  the   "dismal  science" 
and    its    professors.      Dickens,    Kingsley,    and    other 
.romancers,   had   fiercely  inveighed  against   the  Grad- 
|grind  philosophy  of  labour  and  the  moral  and  social 
'curse  it  involved.    Maurice  and  the  Christian  Socialists 
Were   full  of  indignation  with  the  plutonomy  of  the 
orthodox  economists  from  whom  John  Stuart  Mill  to 


vm.]  AS  SOCIAL  REFORMER  97 

a  great  extent  had  dissociated  himself.  The  corre- 
spondence between  Mill  and  Comte,  and  Comte's  own 
Polity,  show  how  entirely  alien  to  plutonomic  orthodoxy 
was  the  Positive  Philosophy ;  but  of  this  John  Ruskin 
was  in  1860,  and  remained  all  his  life,  perfectly  ignorant. 
But  he  was  saturated  with  the  thought  of  Carlyle,  and 
he  was  in  close  touch  with  Maurice  and  his  friends, 
and  both  of  these  men  were  in  touch  with  the  revolu- 
tionists and  socialists  whom  the  European  events 
between  1848  and  1860  made  familiar  to  thoughtful 
Englishmen.  Ruskin  was  thus  not  by  any  means  the 
first  to  throw  doubts  over  the  gospel  of  Ricardo  and 
M'Culloch.  But  he  was  no  doubt  the  first  to  open 
fire  on  the  very  creed  and  decalogue  of  that  gospel, 
and  he  certainly  was  the  first  to  put  those  doubts  and 
criticisms  into  trenchant  literary  form  such  as  long 
stirred  the  general  public  as  with  a  trumpet  note. 

The  four  essays,  so  characteristically  entitled — "The 
Roots  of  Honour,"  "The  Veins  of  Wealth,"  ''Qui 
judicatis  Terram^''  ''Ad  Valorem,''  open  with  this 
trenchant  sentence : — 

"Among  the  delusions  which  at  different  periods  have 
possessed  themselves  of  the  minds  of  large  masses  of  the 
human  race,  perhaps  the  most  curious — certainly  the  least 
creditable — is  the  modern  soi-disant  science  of  poUtical 
economy,  based  on  the  idea  that  an  advantageous  code  of , 
social  action  may  be  determined  irrespectively  of  the  influence  • 
of  social  affection." 

This  crucial  truth,  if  we  understand  it  as  meaning 
that  a  science  of  wealth  cannot  be  carried  beyond  a 
few  corollary  deductions  of  special  application,  drawn 
from  a  comprehensive  system  of  social  economy  at 
large,  that  is,  a  true  "philosophy  of  society,"  had  never 

G 


98  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

before  been  stated  so  boldly  and  so  dogmatically 
except  by  Auguste  Comte.  As  Professor  Ingram 
well  puts  it,  Comte's  argument  was,  that  "  a  separate 
economic  science  is,  strictly  speaking,  an  impossibility, 
as  representing  only  one  portion  of  a  complex 
organism,  all  whose  parts  and  their  actions  are  in 
constant  relation  of  correspondence  and  reciprocal 
modification/'  But  of  this,  which  had  been  stated 
a  generation  before  him,  Euskin  had  never  heard  ;  nor 
would  he  have  put  it  in  any  way  so  systematic  if  he 
had  heard. 

E-uskin  rushed  at  the  problem  wholly  from  the 
mediaeval,  sentimental,  and  social  point  of  view;  but 
he  grasped  the  root  of  the  matter  keenly,  and  argued 
it  with  his  glowing  style.  He  does  not  deny  the  con- 
clusions of  the  science  if  its  assumptions  are  admitted. 
But  they  are  as  void  of  practical  interest  to  human 
society  as  would  be  a  science  of  gymnastics  which 
assumed  that  men  had  no  skeletons.  Modern  political 
economy,  he  says,  assumes  that  human  beings  are  all 
skeleton,  and  "founds  an  ossifiant  theory  of  progress 
on  this  negation  of  a  soul;  and  having  shown  the 
utmost  that  may  be  made  of  bones,  and  constructed  a 
number  of  interesting  geometrical  figures  with  death's 
heads  and  humeri,  successfully  proves  the  incon- 
venience of  the  reappearance  of  a  soul  among  these 
corpuscular  structures." 

In  its  theory  of  Labour  and  Production,  the  orthodox 
political  economy,  he  says,  assumes  that  the  servant  is 
an  engine  of  which  the  motive  power  is  steam  or  some 
calculable  force.  On  the  contrary,  "he  is  an  engine 
whose  motive  power  is  a  Soul ;  and  the  force  of  this 
^  very  peculiar  agent,  as  an  unknown  quantity,  enters 


VIII.]  AS  SOCIAL  REFORMER  99 

into  all  the  political  economist's  equations,  without  his 
knowledge,  and  falsifies  every  one  of  their  results." 
No  doubt,  so  far  as  human  beings,  whether  controlling 
capital  or  controlled  by  it,  are  continuously  moved  by 
some  calculable  force,  and  for  the  time  exclude  any 
other  influence,  the  deductions  of  the  plutonomists  are 
sound  and  real.  But  in  any  healthy  society  of  men 
this  state  of  things  can  only  be  temporary  in  duration 
and  limited  in  scope. 

The  little  volume  of  170  pages  abounds  in  memor- 
able sentences,  which  if  not  sufficient  as  science,  are 
curiously  suggestive  for  reflection.  What  do  we  mean 
by  "rich  "?  In  truth,  riches  act  only  through  negation. 
The  force  of  your  guinea  depends  wholly  on  the  want 
of  it  by  your  neighbour.  If  he  did  not  want  it,  it 
would  be  of  no  use  to  you.  The  art  of  making  your- 
self rich  is  the  art  of  keeping  your  neighbour  poor. 
A  society  of  universal  millionaires  would  have  to  black 
their  own  boots.  "Riches  is  essentially  power  over 
men."  "  That  which  seems  to  be  wealth  may  in  verity 
be  only  the  gilded  index  of  far-reaching  ruin,  a 
wrecker's  handful  of  coin  gleaned  from  the  beach  to 
which  he  has  beguiled  an  argosy."  "Buy  in  the 
cheapest  market  ^ — yes ;  but  what  made  your  market 
cheap?  Charcoal  may  be  cheap  among  your  roof 
timbers  after  a  fire,  and  bricks  may  be  cheap  in  your 
streets  after  an  earthquake;  but  fire  and  earthquake 
may  not  therefore  be  national  benefits.  Sell  in  the 
dearest  ? — yes,  truly ;  but  what  made  your  market 
dear  ?  You  sold  your  bread  well  to-day ;  was  it  to  a 
dying  man  who  gave  his  last  coin  for  it,  and  ^vill  never 
need  bread  more;  or  to  a  rich  man  who  to-morrow 
will  buy  your  farm  over  your  head  ;  or  to  a  soldier  on 


100  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

his  way  to  pillage  the  bank  in  which  you  have  put 
your  fortune  ? " 

Then  comes  that  passage  which  I  have  always  taken 
as  a  masterpiece  of  wit,  wisdom,  and  eloquence.     "  In 
a  community  regulated  only  by  laws  of  demand  and 
supply,  but  protected  from  open  violence,  the  persons 
who  become  rich  are,  generally  speaking,  industrious, 
resolute,  proud,  covetous,  prompt,  methodical,  sensible, 
unimaginative,  insensitive,  and  ignorant.    The  persons 
who  remain  poor  are  the  entirely  foolish,  the  entirely 
wise,  the  idle,  the  reckless,  the  humble,  the  thoughtful, 
the    dull,   the    imaginative,   the    sensitive,  the    well- 
informed,  the  improvident,  the  irregularly  and  impul- 
sively wicked,  the  clumsy  knave,  the  open  thief,  and 
the  entirely  merciful,  just,  and  godly  person."     And 
the  whole  closes  with  the  words  :  "  There  is  no  wealth 
Ajj  hut  Life — Life,  including  all  its  powers  of  love,  of  joy, 
j  and  of  admiration.     That  country  is  the  richest  which 
]  nourishes  the  greatest  number  of  noble  and   happy 
'  human  beings." 
^        That  is  the  Political  Economy  of  John  Euskin ;  in 
other  words,  the  conditions  producing  material  wealth 
are  inextricably  intermingled    with,   the   general   con- 
ditions of  a  healthy  and  worthy  body  politic.     This 
central  and  saving  truth  has   never   been   illustrated 
w4th  more  incisive  eloquence,  nor  enforced  with  a  more 
intense  conviction.     It  is  not  needful  to  enlarge  on  the 
errors  and  extravagances  which  mark  this  as    every 
other  vrork  of  Euskin.     There  are  things  fanciful,  even 
fantastic,  though  much  less  than  in  other  pieces.     The 
attack  on  Mill  is  both  ignorant  and  unjust ;  for  Mill 
certainly  strove  to  neutralise  the  narrow  field  on  which 
political  economy  is  legitimate,  it  may  be  with  poor 


Tin.]  AS  SOCIAL  REFORMER  101 

success.  But  Mill  should  never  be  confounded  with 
Ricardo,  much  less  -with  the  Gradgrind  plutonomists 
who  treated  the  observed  facts  of  a  morbid  society  as 
having  a  moral  and  social  obligation  for  all  time. 

It  may  be  that  Ruskin's  definitions  are  too  fanciful 
to  be  definite.  And  he  indulges  to  the  full  his  old 
Calvinistic  habit  of  extorting  philosophy  out  of  texts 
of  Scripture,  which  are  interpreted  freely  to  suit  the 
occasion;  as  when  he  deduces  the  permanent  anta- 
gonism between  rich  and  poor  from  the  Proverbs  of 
Solomon — "a  Jew  merchant,  largely  engaged  in 
business  on  the  Gold  Coast,  and  reported  to  have  made 
one  of  the  largest  fortunes  of  his  time."  As  to  his 
petulant  contempt  of  all  whom  he  was  denouncing,  it 
is  hardly  fair  to  ask  a  man  engaged  in  a  battle  with  an 
army  to  exhibit  moderation.  No  one  calls  Elijah  con- 
ceited when  he  mocked  the  priests  of  Baal,  nor  was 
John  the  Baptist  arrogant  when  he  reproved  Herod  to 
,his  face.  We  must  take  the  Reformers,  the  Hot-gos- 
pellers, and  Prophets  ^Wth  a  mission  as  we  find  them, 
and  accept  fx'om  them  what  we  can.  ^y 

The  general  indignation  which  these  essays  in  the' 
Cornhill  aroused,  induced  the  publishers  to  press 
Thackeray  to  suspend  their  issue.  This  was  done  after 
the  fourth  essay ;  and  they  did  not  appear  as  a  volume 
until  two  years  later.  On  the  appearance  of  the 
volume,  Mr.  J.  A.  Froude,  then  Editor  of  Fraser's 
Magazine,  admitted  a  new  set  of  papers  on  "  Political 
Economy  "  (June  1862).  But,  again,  the  public  opposi- 
tion was  so  marked  that  after  the  fourth  paper  they 
were  stopped.  They  ultimately  appeared  as  Munera 
Tulveris,  1872.  This  volume  then  consisted  of  six 
chapters,  and  was  dedicated  to  Carlyle — "  The  Solitary 


102  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

Teacher  "  of  truth,  justice,  and  godliness.  It  would  be 
needless  to  criticise  the  most  discursive  arguments  and 
apostrophes  arranged  under  the  heads  of  I.  Definitions ; 
II.  Store-keeping;  iil.  Coin-keeping;  IV.  Commerce; 
V.  Government;  vi.  Mastership;  and  Vll.  Appendices 
about  Things  in  General. 

Munera  Pulveris  is  the  title  taken  from  the  line  of 
Horace — pulveris  exigui  prope  litus  parva  Matinum  munera 
— the  cryptic  allusion  of  which  so  few  readers  under- 
stand. It  opens  with  the  trenchant  proposition  that 
Political  Economy,  as  popularly  understood,  "is  in 
reality  nothing  more  than  the  investigation  of  some 
accidental  phenomena  of  modern  commercial  opera- 
tions." As  domestic  economy  regulates  the  acts  and 
habits  of  a  household,  so  Political  Economy  (rightly  so 
called)  "regulates  those  of  a  society  or  State,  mth 
reference  to  the  means  of  its  maintenance."  And  on 
this  text  Ruskin  proceeds  to  lay  down  a  number  of 
propositions,  rules,  and  criticisms  to  regulate  the  action 
of  society,  at  least  in  its  active  side,  according  to  an 
ideal  of  his  o^vn.  The  book  is  thus  far  more  construc- 
tive and  more  comprehensive  than  the  former  essay 
Unto  this  Last,  though  it  rests  on  the  same  general  idea 
that  the  orthodox  economists  assumed  men  to  be 
moved  solely  by  interested  motives,  whilst  in  reality 
men  and  societies  are  exceedingly  complex  organisms, 
and  their  acts  and  purposes  can  only  be  rationally 
understood  when  they  are  treated  as  complex 
organisms. 

At  the  outset  Ruskin,  in  his  vague  and  fanciful  way, 
does  seize  the  root  of  the  matter  that  there  can  be  no 
rational  political  economy  apart  from  a  comprehensive 
Sociology.     Of  course,  both  the  term  and  the  idea  in 


VIII.]  AS  SOCIAL  REFORMER  103 

its  full  sense  are  quite  foreign  to  him  and  to  his  mode 
of  thought,  but  he  seizes  the  truth.  A  rational  political 
economy  can  only  be  a  deduction  from  a  complete 
philosophy  of  society.  With  astonishing  wit,  eloquence, 
and  ingenuity,  Ruskin  illustrates  and  enforces  this  text. 
But  in  Munera  Fulveris  he  goes  much  further.  It  is 
largely  constructive,  and  here  he  has  to  extemporise  a 
social  philosophy  of  his  own.  For  such  a  task  he  was 
utterly  unfitted  by  his  very  scanty  learning,  by  habit, 
and  by  the  cast  of  his  mind.  He  can  only  throw  forth 
a  few  suggestions,  more  or  less  echoes  of  Plato,  the 
Bible,  mediaeval  art,  and  Carlyle.  Nothing  less  ade- 
quate as  a  coherent  and  systematic  synthesis  of  society 
can  be  imagined.  He,  the  self-taught,  desultory,  im- 
pulsive student  of  poetry  and  the  arts,  rushes  in  to 
achieve  the  mighty  task  which  Plato,  Aristotle,  Aquinas, 
Leibnitz  undertook  —  and  failed,  and  which  Locke, 
Kant,  Hume,  and  Bentham  touched  only  in  sections. 
Looking  back  over  the  long  succession  of  efforts  to 
construct  a  systematic  sociology^,  which  as  a  complete 
scheme  has  only  in  recent  times  been  planned  out  by 
Comte  and  by  Spencer,  it  is  difficult  to  abstain  from 
censuring  Ruskin  for  toying  with  a  subject  of  which 
he  was  profoundly  ignorant,  for  he  knew  as  little  of 
the  literature  of  philosophy  as  of  the  practical  life  of 
our  age. 

And,  unhappily,  private  and  domestic  sorrows  had 
grown  on  him.  His  father  was  deeply  grieved  and 
disappointed  at  the  heresy  of  his  son,  which  seemed  to 
him  so  wanton  and  inexplicable.  The  savage  insults 
of  the  critics,  echoing  as  usual  the  conventional  opinion 
of  the  time,  made  him  reckless  and  defiant.  He 
became  more  than  ever  arrogant  and  dogmatic,  and 


104  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

repaid  ridicule  with  scorn.  And  his  habits  of  fantastic 
imagery,  Biblical  tropes,  and  interminable  excursions 
were  more  prominent  than  ever.  It  is  but  too  obvious, 
if  we  compare  the  work  of  1863  with  that  of  1860, 
that  the  flame  of  indignation  against  social  oppression 
and  the  misery  of  the  poor,  and  his  brooding  over  a 
state  of  things  he  was  powerless  to  change,  had  already 
begun  to  induce  that  brain  disturbance  from  which  he 
suffered  so  long  and  so  cruelly.  Henceforth  unto  the 
end,  yet  far  distant,  it  might  be  said  of  Ruskin  as 
runs  the  epitaph  that  Swift  proposed  for  himself,  saeva 
indignatio  cor  lacerahat. 

And  the  same  ideas  about  a  reconstruction  of  social 
institutions  and  habits  were  scattered,  in  a  desultory 
and  eager  way,  through  the  twenty-five  letters  addressed 
to  a  working  cork-cutter  of  Sunderland  in  1867,  on 
the  occasion  of  the  Reform  agitation  of  that  time,  and 
published  under  the  title  of  Time  and  Tide.  The  idea 
of  this  series  was  to  urge  working  men  to  consider, 
not  merely  the  question  of  the  suffrage,  but  the  reform 
of  laws  bearing  upon  "honesty  of  work  and  honesty 
of  exchange."  As  usual,  he  branches  out  into  a  mass 
of  startling  proposals  and  sweeping  anathemas.  A 
written  statement  of  the  principal  events  in  the  life 
of  each  family  was  to  be  annually  rendered  to  a  State 
officer;  and  there  was  to  be  an  overseer,  or  bishop, 
for  every  hundred  families  to  see  that  such  account 
was  accurately  and  punctually  made.  All  goods  made 
were  to  be  certified  by  the  trade  guild,  which  would 
fix  the  price,  and  advertisement  of  wares  was  to  be 
prohibited.  Lands  were  to  be  granted  in  perpetuity 
to  the  great  old  families  (John  James,  the  father,  surely 
approved  of  this),  but  they  were  not  to  derive  any 


VIII.  j  AS  SOCIAL  REFORMER  105 

income  from  these  lands,  and  they  were  to  be  paid  by 
the  State,  as  the  king  is.  In  little  more  than  two 
hundred  pages,  fifty  texts  from  the  Bible  are  cited  and 
used  to  support  proposed  legislation.  Early  marriage 
is  desirable,  but  marriages  are  not  to  be  made  without 
consent  of  the  State,  and  bachelors  and  maidens  are 
to  have  as  rewards  permission  to  marry  at  some  future 
date.  Every  bachelor  and  girl  who  obtains  such  per- 
mit is  to  have  a  fixed  income  from  the  State  for  seven 
years  from  the  wedding  day.  Large  families  are  to 
be  condemned — as  indeed  the  very  Malthusians  teach. 

It  is  needless  to  continue  this  record  of  a  social 
Utopia  as  subversive  as  that  of  Plato,  or  Fourier,  and 
recalling  the  Jesuits  in  Paraguay  rather  than  anything 
in  modern  Europe.  These  "Letters"  are  indeed  not 
so  much  a  social  Utopia  as  the  passionate  sermons  of 
a  religious  enthusiast;  and  not  more  impracticable 
than  those  of  John  the  Baptist,  Saint  Francis,  Savon- 
arola, or  George  Fox.  Sca^ttered  through  them  are 
noble,  \dse,  and  memorable  sayings — what  Carlyle 
called  his  "  fierce  lightning  bolts  " — flashed  forth  from 
his  "  divine  rage  against  falsity."  Industrial  co-opera- 
tion "is  better  than  unjust  and  tyrannous  master- 
ship"; but  he  doubts  if  "it  be  better  than  a  just  and 
benignant  mastership" — that  is,  a  society  in  which 
"the  master,  as  a  minor  king  or  governor,  is  held 
responsible  for  the  conduct  as  well  as  the  comfort  of 
all  those  under  his  rule."  No  great  social  change  can 
ever  be  accomplished  quickly  or  violently.  "If  you 
could  pass  laws  to-morrow,"  he  says,  of  the  kind 
Socialists  require,  "the  riches  of  the  country  would 
at  once  leave  it,  and  you  would  perish  in  riot  and 
famine."   What  a  beautiful  bit  is  that  about  the  draught 


106  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

horse  used  to  shunt  trucks,  and  so  chained  in  the  rail- 
way siding  (Letter  V.) — a  creature  whom  he  can  never 
see  "without  a  kind  of  worship,"  as  he  says  in  words 
worthy  of  St.  Francis  of  Assisi.  "  A  knave's  religion 
is  always  the  rottenest  thing  about  him." 

The  account  of  the  four  modes  in  which  the  Bible 
is  regarded  in  our  day  is  true  and  admirably  put ;  and 
here,  perhaps,  we  get  the  first  plain  statement  of  the 
extent  to  which  he  had  parted  with  his  mother's  rigid 

\  Calvinism.  To  hold  that  "  virtue  is  impossible  but 
for  fear  of  hell,"  is  to  be  in  a  hell  of  your  own.     Was 

'  the  power  of  music  ever  celebrated  in  more  beautiful 
words  than  these  (Letter  xi.) :  "Music  is  the  nearest 
at  hand,  the  most  orderly,  the  most  delicate,  and  t^e 
most  perfect  of  all  bodily  pleasures ;  it  is  the  only  one 
which  is  equally  helpful  to  all  the  ages  of  men — helpful 
from  the  nurse's  song  to  her  infant,  to  the  music,  un- 
heard of  others,  which  so  often  haunts  the  deathbed 
of  pure  and  innocent  spirits."  A  modern  State  is  a 
ship  where  "on  the  deck  the  aspect  is  of  Cleopatra's 
galley — under  hatches  there  is  a  slave  hospital,"  whilst 
even  those  who  earnestly  care  to  do  any  good  can, 
Avith  such  difficulty,  see  the  whole  of  the  evil  and  the 
proper  remedy,  "  that  half  of  their  best  efforts  will  be 
misdirected,  and  some  may  even  do  more  harm  than 
good."  What  a  picture  is  this  of  the  tender  and 
somewhat  hysterical  philanthropist,  who  penned  words 
so  true,  so  sad,  so  wise  ! 

And  now,  as  we  look  back  across  forty  years  upon 
these  social  Utopias  which  were  met  wdth  such  a  storm 
of  anger  and  ridicule,  it  is  curious  to  note  how  many 
of  them  are  familiar  to  our  age.  "We  are  all  Socialists 
now,"  said  a  leading  politician.     And  although  Ruskin 


VIII.]  AS  SOCIAL  REFORMER  107 

is  not  a  Socialist — indeed,  he  is  rather  a  mediseyal 
reactionist  or  an  aristocratic  absolutist,  if  label  has  to 
be  found  for  him — there  is  in  all  his  social  theories 
that  element  of  the  ascendency  of  the  State,  or  of 
Society,  over  the  individual,  the  precedence  of  moral 
over  material  and  practical  aims,  the  necessity  for 
organisation  of  labour,  and  a  moral  and  spiritual  con- 
trol over  self-interest,  which  is  the  fundamental  essence 
of  Socialism.  Ruskin's  ideal  is  a  Sociocracy  in  Comte's 
sense ;  and,  ^\dth  Comte,  he  rejected  both  pure  Demo  \ 
cracy  and  abstract  Equality,  and  stood  by  the  old  world 
institutions  of  Property,  Grovernment,  and  Church.  ' 

•f  The  pedantic,  pseudo-scientific  Plutonomy,  or  Science 
of*Wealth,  which  he  denounced,  is  as  dead  as  Alchemy 
or  Phlogiston.  His  notion  that  economic  prosperity  • 
is  subordinate  to  the  wellbeing  of  the  people  is  the 
axiom  of  politicians  as  of  philosophers.  His  idea  that 
the  wise  use  of  wealth,  the  distribution  of  products,  - 
the  health  and  happiness  of  the  producers,  come  before 
the  accumulation  of  wealth,  is  a  commonplace,  not  of  j 
philanthropists,  but  of  statesmen  and  journalists.  His) 
appeal  for  organisation  of  industry,  the  suppression  of 
public  nuisances,  and  restriction  of  all  anti-social  abuses, ; 
is  a  truism  to  the  reformers  of  to-day.  So  is  much  of 
what  he  said  about  national  education  long  years 
before  Mr.  Forster,  about  old-age  pensions  long  years 
before  Mr.  Chamberlain,  about  the  housing  of  the 
working  classes  long  years  before  the  Statutes,  Con- 
ferences, and  Eoyal  Commissions  of  our  own  genera- 
tion. Read  all  he  says  as  to  the  necessity  of  training 
schools,  technical  schools,  State  supervision  of  prac- 
tical and  physical  education,  help  to  the  unemployed, 
provision  for  the  aged,  the  recovery  of  waste  lands, 


108  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap.  viii. 

the  qualified  ownership  of  the  soil,  the  reprobation  of 
men  who  "would  put  the  filth  of  tobacco  even  into 
the  first  breeze  of  a  May  morning" — read  all  these 
glancings  of  a  keen  and  pure  soul  from  heaven  to  earth 
on  a  multitude  of  things  social  and  humane,  and  you 
will  recognise  how  truly  John  Ruskin  forty  years  ago 
was  a  pioneer  of  the  things  which  to-day  the  best 
spirits  of  our  time  so  earnestly  yearn  to  see.  He  is 
forgotten  now  because  he  went  forth  into  a  sort  of 
moral  wilderness  and  cried,  "Repent  and  reform,  for 
the  kingdom  of  heaven  is  at  hand."  The  kingdom  of 
heaven  is  not  yet  come  on  us,  perhaps  is  yet  far  ofi"; 
but  John  was  the  Forerunner  of  that  which  will  one 
day  come  to  pass.  He  was  not,  as  the  mocking  crowd 
said,  "a  reed  shaken  with  the  wind." 


CHAPTER    IX 

THE  ETHICS  OF  WORK   AND   OF  ART 

It  was  in  his  forty-sixth  year  (March  1864)  that  a 
great  change  took  place  in  the  life  of  Ruskin  by  the 
death  of  his  father,  and  his  own  inheritance  of  a  large 
fortune,  the  growing  infirmity  of  his  venerable  mother, 
and  the  arrival  in  the  home  of  his  cousin,  Joanna 
Ruskin  Agnew,  who  eventually  became  Mrs.  Arthur 
Severn,  and  remained  beside  him  till  his  death.  The 
seven  years  between  his  father's  death  and  his  mother's, 
and  the  final  removal  to  Coniston,  where  he  passed  the 
last  thirty  years  of  his  life,  were  years  of  varied  activity 
and  incessant  lecturing,  travelling,  and  writing,  of 
domestic  sorrow,  of  illness,  increasing  irritation  and 
meditation,  and  a  perpetual  brooding  over  the  social 
and  political  problems  of  that  crowded  time. 

One  night,  early  in  1864,  on  returning  at  midnight 
from  a  class  at  the  Working  Men's  College,  he  found 
his  father  waiting  for  him  to  read  to  him  some  letters, 
and  in  a  few  days  the  old  man  was  dead  in  his  seventy- 
ninth  year.  He  wa«  buried  at  Shirley  Church,  in 
Sun^ey,  and  the  son  inscribed  upon  his  tomb  these 
words  :  "He  was  an  entirely  honest  merchant,  and  his 
memory  is  to  all  who  keep  it  dear  and  helpful.  His 
son,  whom  he  loved  to  the  uttermost,  and  taught  to 
speak  truth,  says  this  of  him." 

109 


110  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

By  his  father's  death  Ruskin  inherited  a  fortune  of 
£157,000,  in  addition  to  a  considerable  property  in 
houses  and  land,  the  whole  of  which  estate  the  elder 
had  accumulated  by  industry  and  sagacity  in  legitimate 
business.  He  was  not  only  an  entirely  honest 
merchant,  but  a  man  of  great  generosity,  of  shrewd 
judgment,  and  of  persevering  culture  in  poetry  and 
art.  His  erratic  genius  of  a  son,  on  whom  he  had 
lavished  his  wealth  and  his  anxieties,  had  long  parted 
from  him  in  ideas  of  religion  as  well  as  economics. 
But  the  affection  between  them  remained  unimpaired ; 
and  so,  John  Euskin  had  remained  long  past  middle 
life,  in  his  father's  home,  as  it  were,  an  indulged  but 
dutiful  lad,  hardly  regarded  as  fit  to  stand  alone  in  this 
busy  and  practical  world. 

The  aged  mother,  now  in  her  eighty-fourth  year, 
very  infirm  and  Avith  failing  eyesight,  needed  some 
companion  in  the  great  house  at  Denmark  Hill.  So 
there  came  to  live  with  her  their  Scotch  cousin,  Joanna 
Ruskin  Agnew.  She  was  a  daughter  of  George  Agnew, 
hereditary  Sheriff-Clerk  of  Wigtown,  by  Catherine 
Tweddale,  niece  of  that  Catherine  Tweddale  who,  in 
1781,  had  run  away  to  marry  John  Buskin  the  grand- 
father. It  was  a  family  of  cousinship;  for  Joanna 
Agnew  was  a  cousin  (in  various  removes,  as  is  the 
Scotch  way)  of  the  Buskins,  the  Bichardsons,  and  the 
Coxes.  Her  brilliant  gifts,  bright  nature,  and  loving 
care  soothed  the  last  years  of  old  Mrs.  Buskin;  and 
after  the  marriage  to  Arthur  Severn  in  1871,  she  played 
the  part  of  a  daughter  to  the  later  years  of  the  son. 
In  Prmterita  he  tells  us  of  her  coming  to  his  mother,  of 
her  "real  faculty  and  genius  in  all  rightly  girlish 
directions,"  her  extremely  sweet  voice,  inventive  wit, 


IX.]  THE  ETHICS  OF  WORK  AND  OF  AKT  111 

and  sense  of  humour.  She  stayed  beside  him  from  that 
first  arrival  at  Denmark  Hill,  whether  as  girl  or  wife, 
for  twenty-nine  years,  "nor  virtually,"  he  wrote,  "have 
she  and  I  ever  parted  since." 

Having  no  specific  work  on  hand,  Euskin  devoted 
himself  to  lectures  in  many  places,  in  all  of  which  Art 
was  made  subordinate  to  ethical  and  social  ideals.  It 
was  during  this  time  that  he  gave  the  two  lectures  at 
Manchester,  in  1864,  "Of  King's  Treasuries"  and  "Of 
Queen's  Gardens,"  which,  with  the  Dublin  lecture  of 
1868,  on  "The  Mystery  of  Life  and  its  Arts,"  was  sub- 
sequently kno^vn  as  the  volume  so  oddly  named  Sesame 
and  Lilies^  1871.  Why  Sesame  and  Lilies  I  have  never 
been  able  to  unriddle.  He  introduces  a  quotation  about 
a  sesame  (or  oil  seed)  cake  from  Lucian,  and  a  text  from 
Isaiah  about  lilies  blooming  in  the  desert ;  but  I  fail  to 
understand  what  "  Sesame  "  has  to  do  with  the  Royal 
Treasury,  or  why  a  "lily  "  in  a  desert  is  a  royal  garden 
— nor  does  it  much  signify.  I  remember  hearing 
Ruskin  give  a  lecture  at  the  London  Institution,  which 
had  been  announced  with  the  title  of  "  Crystallography." 
He  opened  by  telling  us  that  he  was  really  about  to 
lecture  on  "  Cistercian  Architecture,"  nor  did  it  matter 
what  the  title  was.  "For,"  said  he,  "if  I  had  begun  to 
speak  about  Cistercian  Abbeys,  I  should  have  been 
sure  to  get  on  Crystals  presently ;  and  if  I  had  begun 
upon  Crystals,  I  should  have  soon  drifted  into  Archi- 
tecture ! " 

Sesame  and  Lilies^  in  spite  of  its  title  (Ruskin's  titles 
seem  to  have  had  no  purpose  except  to  give  the  in- 
ventor of  them  a  few  minutes'  amusement)^ — Sesame 

^  Titles  of  books  seem  as  meaningless  as  those  of  peers.  The 
Fortnightly    is   a    monthly ;    the  Nineteenth    Century    is    the 


112  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

and  Lilies  is  the  most  popular  of  all  his  minor  works. 
My  copy  (of  1900)  is  stated  to  be  "the  forty-fourth 
thousand  " ;  and  in  many  ways  it  justifies  that  popu- 
larity. It  contains  some  of  his  most  beautiful  passages, 
some  of  his  noblest  thoughts,  and  especially  some  in- 
most revelations  of  himself.  It  is  pathetically  dedi- 
cated to  4)iX-q^  without  whose  help,  he  says,  "  I  should 
have  written  and  thought  no  more."  We  now  know 
that  she  was  Rose  La  Touche,  the  child  to  whom  he 
had  taught  drawing  in  1858,  who  saddened  his  later 
life  by  refusing  to  be  his  wife,  and  who  died  in  1875. 

"  King's  Treasuries  "  (which,  being  interpreted,  means 
the  use  of  good  books,  or  solid  education)  is  an 
eloquent  plea  against  wasting  time  in  the  reading  of 
valueless  books,  and  the  duty  of  making  a  select  library 
of  good  and  permanent  books.  This  is  exactly  the  aim 
of  Auguste  Comte  when  he  published,  in  1851,  his 
Fositivist  Library  for  the  Nineteenth  Century,  but  of  this 
John  Euskin  had  never  heard.  Carlyle  said  much  the 
same  at  Edinburgh  a  few  years  later;  and,  twenty 
years  after  Euskin,  Sir  John  Lubbock  made  his  ex- 
cellent collection  of  the  "Best  Hundred  Books."  At 
that  time,  it  may  be  remembered,  Euskin  explained 
how  he  dissented  from  the  selections  made  by  Comte 
and  Lubbock,  and  these  agreed  to  a  great  extent. 
Euskin  put  in  his  Index  Expurgatorius  all  the  non- 
Christian  moralists  and  all  the  theology  (except 
Jeremy  Taylor  and  Bunyan),  Lucretius,  the  Nibelungen, 
and  the  Morte  d' Arthur,  Eastern  Poetry,  Sophocles  and 
Euripides,  all  the  modern  historians,  all  the  philoso- 
phers, Thackeray,  George  Eliot,  and  Kingsley,  Swift, 

Twentieth  ;  the  Quarterly  ought  to  be  the  ' '  Grandfatherly  "' ; 
the  Edinburgh  has  been  London  for  some  hundred  years. 


IX.]  THE  ETHICS  OF  WORK  AND  OF  ART  113 

Hume,    Macaulay,    and   Emerson.      Euskin's    "King's 
Treasury  "  certainly  discloses  a  rather  meagre  exchequer. 

In  spite  of  this — and  it  must  be  remembered  that,  in 
1886,  Euskin's  brain  had  been  more  than  once  dis- 
turbed, and  that  he  had  returned  to  some  of  his  old 
theological  prejudices — Sesame  and  Lilies  has  many  fine 
things  exquisitely  said.  His  scathing  denunciation  of 
the  conventional  upper  class  education  "  befitting  such 
and  such  station  in  life" — an  education  which  shall 
"lead  to  advancement  in  life"— meaning  "the  be- 
coming conspicuous  in  life."  "  You  might  read  all  the  i 
books  in  the  British  Museum  and  remain  an  utterly 
'illiterate,'  uneducated  person."  How  much  would  the  \ 
bookshelves  of  the  United  Kingdom  fetch  as  compared 
with  their  wine  cellars  ?  "  Lilies "  is  a  sermon  for 
women.  It  has  some  beautiful  thoughts  on  the  women 
of  Shakespeare,  Dante,  Sophocles,  and  Spenser,  and 
some  less  obvious  praise  of  Scott's  women.  He  says, 
almost  exactly  in  the  words  used  by  Comte  many 
years  before  him :  "  Each  sex  has  what  the  other  has 
not ;  each  completes  the  other,  and  is  completed  by  the 
other;  they  are  in  nothing  alike,  and  the  happiness 
and  perfection  of  both  depends  on  each  asking  and 
receiving  from  the  other  what  the  other  only  can  give." 
And  in  words  of  exquisite  grace  he  sketches  for  the 
girl  an  education,  and  for  the  woman  a  career,  which 
his  Socialist  admirers  have  found  perilously  akin  to 
that  of  Auguste  Comte. 

The  last  lecture,  given  at  Dublin  in  1868,  well 
entitled  "The  Mystery  of  Life  and  its  Arts,"  is  the 
most  important,  most  personal,  and  most  thoughtful  of 
all ;  indeed,  its  sixty  pages  contain  much  of  Euskin's 
most  memorable  work.    It  is  full  of  sadness,  of  religious 

H 


114    ""  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

musing,  and  of  passionate  exhortation  to  work  out  a 
social  reformation,  to  feel  the  mystery  and  the  power 
that  lies  dormant  in  each  human  soul,  and  more 
passionate  reprobation  of  the  materialism  and  selfishness 
which  society  breeds  in  our  generation  so  as  to  hide 
that  mystery  and  to  pervert  that  power.  The  homily 
is  full  of  personal  confessions,  of  disappointment,  and 
failure.  It  is  a  sad  tale.  The  ten  best  years  of  his  life 
given  to  Turner  had  proved  in  vain.  The  years  he  had 
given  to  painting  and  to  architecture  had  been  wasted, 
for  the  social  diseases  of  our  age  had  made  men  in- 
curably blind  to  the  higher  uses  of  either  art.  The 
arts  can  never  be  right  unless  their  Tnotive  is  right. 
And  modern  civilisation  makes  us  insensitive  to  high 
motives  and  apathetic  to  noble  aims.  "The  reckless 
luxury,  the  deforming  mechanism,  and  the  squalid 
misery  of  modern  cities  "  make  great  art  an  impossi- 
bility, and  thought  given  to  it  a  mockery. 

From  the  date  of  his  father's  death  and  his  own 
responsibility  for  a  large  fortune,  the  public  rejection 
of  his  social  and  economic  teaching,  the  chorus  of 
ridicule  poured  on  him  when  he  turned  from  gesthetic 
criticism  to  life,  society,  and  politics,  the  loneliness  cf 
his  life  and  idiosyncrasy  deepened  his  natural  turn 
towards  melancholy,  and  it  is  especially  marked  in 
Sesame  and  Lilies.  He  wrote  to  his  mother  in  1867, 
'*  I  have  the  secret  of  extracting  sadness  from  all  things 
instead  of  joy."  He  wrote  to  C.  Eliot  Norton  from 
Switzerland,  "  The  loneliness  is  very  very  great,  and  the 
peace  in  which  I  am  at  present  is  only  as  if  I  had  buried 
myself  in  a  tuft  of  grass  on  a  battlefield  wet  with 
blood."  "  Swift  is  very  like  me,"  he  wrote  in  1869 — 
words  how  full  of  pathos  and  of  truth.     And  that  most 


IX.]  THE  ETHICS  OF  WORK  AND  OF  ART  115 

strange  bit  of  autobiography  {Sesame,  Preface,  21  par.) 
which  ends,  that  "in  my  enforced  and  accidental 
temper,  and  thoughts  of  things  and  of  people,"  he  has 
sympathy  with  Dean  Swift  of  all  people.  Strange 
parallel,  singular  coincidences  !  The  most  drab-coloured 
with  the  most  purple  of  all  great  masters  of  English ; 
the  most  cynical  with  the  most  idealist  maker  of 
Utopias ;  the  most  foul  with  the  most  prudish  of 
writers ;  the  keenest  politician  with  the  most  unpracti- 
cal of  dreamers;  the  bitterest  hater  with  the  most 
loving  sentimentalist — and  yet  analogies  in  mind  and 
in  circumstance — they  two  so  lonely  in  spirit,  so  like 
in  their  genius  for  sarcasm,  so  boiling  with  indignation 
for  the  people's  wrong,  so  brave,  so  defiant,  each  gifted 
with  such  burning  speech,  both  such  Platonic  lovers, 
yet  so  continually  petted  by  good  women,  both  once 
so  much  sought,  often  so  hotly  reviled,  both  ending 
in  such  a  wreck,  in  something  so  like  despair.  John 
Ruskin  too,  in  his  last  years  of  decayed  power,  could 
have  said,  more  reverently  and  less  arrogantly,  as  he 
turned  over  the  pages  of  his  earlier  books,  "  My  God ! 
what  a  genius  I  had  when  I  wrote  that  I "  He  too 
might  have  truly  written  as  his  own  epitaph  saeva 
iridignatio  cor  lacerabat — yea,  and  could  have  added  et 
mentem  conturbabaf. 

All  through  the  period  between  his  father's  death,  in 
1864,  and  his  own  retirement  to  Brantwood,  Ruskin 
was  continually  lecturing  in  many  places  and  on  diverse 
texts,  but  practically  on  the  one  text  of  the  moral 
bearings  of  Art  and  Life.  Sometimes  it  was  on 
crystals,  or  plants,  or  the  geology  of  the  Alps;  now 
it  was  the  education  of  girls,  or  reading,  or  war,  or 
wages,  music,  dancing,  or  the  future  of  England;  but 


116  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

it  always  came  round  to  the  same  central  lesson — 
healthful  and  happy  life  in  an  industrious  and  well- 
ordered  society.  It  would  be  tedious  to  analyse  all  of 
these  homilies — they  were  usually  much  more  the 
sermons  of  a  preacher  than  the  lessons  of  a  lecturer, 
and  they  are  too  discursive  and  heterogeneous  to  per- 
mit of  being  grouped.  The  Ethics  of  the  Dust  were  a 
set  of  rambling  talks  given  to  the  girls  of  a  young 
ladies'  school  in  Cheshire,  professedly  on  crystals,  but 
on  many  other  things.  For  them  he  wrote  songs  to 
be  sung  whilst  dancing,  and  with  much  of  graceful  fun, 
for  Ruskin  was  never  so  much  at  home  as  when 
enacting  the  elderly  playmate  of  young  girls,  much 
as  the  author  of  Alice  in  Wonderland  loved  to  do. 
And  now  and  then  the  play  seemed  almost  like  flirta- 
tion to  the  old-fashioned  chaperon  or  aunt.  In  any 
case.  Ethics  of  the  Dust  is  full  of  the  author's  quaint 
humour  and  fantasies  ;  and  Carlyle,  in  his  queer  jargon, 
called  it  "a  most  shining  performance" — "radiant 
Avith  talent,  ingenuity,  lambent  fire" — "with  a  poetry 
that  might  fill  any  Tennyson  with  despair."  It  is  not 
recorded  that  the  Laureate  did  feel  the  green-eyed 
monster  within  him  on  perusing  the  piece. 

The  Crown  of  Wild  Olive  (1865-66)  was  a  collection 
of  lectures  on  "Work,"  "Traffic,"  "War,"  and  the 
"Future  of  England,"  given  to  Working  Men  at 
Camberwell,  to  the  Bradford  Chamber  of  Commerce, 
and  the  last  two  to  military  students  at  Woolwich. 
The  wild  olive  was  the  prize  of  the  victor  in  the 
Olympic  games  at  Greece,  and  in  the  Ruskinian  cryp- 
to<^ram  it  means  "the  crown  of  consummate  honour 
and  of  rest,"  as  he  explains  in  a  magnificent  passage 
(Introduction,  §  16).     They  contain  some  of  his  best 


IX.]  THE  ETHICS  OF  WORK  AND  OF  ART  117 

remarks  on  work,  industry,  trade,  conduct,  education, 
and  honour.  Interspersed  (mainly  in  the  first  lecture 
given  to  workmen)  we  may  find  nearly  sixty  texts  of 
Scripture,  inwoven  into  the  argument  in  Ruskin's 
figurative  way.  Though  the  whole  book  is  more 
serious  and  more  coherent  than  some  others,  it  does 
contain  specimens  of  his  furious  exaggeration  and  of 
his  mordant  wit.  Of  the  first,  take  the  description  of 
"that  great  foul  city  of  London — rattling,  growling, 
smoking,  stinking — a  ghastly  heap  of  fermenting  brick- 
work, pouring  out  poison  at  every  pore — a  cricket 
ground  without  the  turf,  a  huge  billiard-table  without 
the  cloth,  and  with  pockets  as  deep  as  the  bottomless 
pit " — all  this  of  one  of  the  most  historic,  one  of  the 
most  varied,  and  quite  the  most  healthy  city  in  the 
Old  or  the  New  World.  Of  the  second,  this  may 
serve — "boiTowers  are  nearly  always  ill-spenders,  and 
it  is  with  lent  money  that  all  evil  is  mainly  done  and 
all  unjust  war  protracted."  How  all  this  comes  home 
to  us  in  1902,  in  this  age  of  Chartered  Companies, 
Monster  Trusts,  and  War  Loans  ! 

The  Queen  of  the  Air  contains  three  lectures  of  1869 
on  Greek  Myths,  Athena,  Apollo,  Hermes,  Hercules, 
and  the  rest,  which  are  mainly  interesting  as  giving 
Euskin's  earliest  direct  study  of  Greek  Art.  They 
show,  too,  a  knowledge  of  Greek  mythology  and  a 
familiarity  with  Greek  poetry  which  are  truly  remark- 
able, when  we  consider  how  broken  had  been  his 
education  in  the  classics.  He  analyses  and  illustrates 
something  like  one  hundred  allusions  to  Greek  poetry, 
mythology,  and  folklore,  and  quotes  Homer,  Hesiod, 
^schylus,  Herodotus,  Pindar,  Euripides,  Aristophanes, 
Virgil,  Horace,  and  Lucian.     Much  of  the  symbolism 


118  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

that  he  sees  in  the  myths — or  rather,  forces  out  of  them 
— is  fanciful  and  ^Wthout  authority,  but  it  is  almost 
always  graceful  and  suggestive.  But  in  the  midst  of 
purely  aesthetic  interpretation  of  Greek  imagery  he 
perpetually  falls  back  on  Economics  —  on  Capital, 
Crime,  Labour,  Land,  Legislation,  Money,  Value,  and 
Wealth.  And  though  his  topic  is  myths,  he  finds 
room  to  speak  of  some  eighty-seven  different  flowers, 
half-a-dozen  different  animals,  and  more  than  a  dozen 
modern  artists. 

His  final  estimate  of  Greek  Art  is  a  wonderful  proof 
of  taste  and  insight ;  coming  as  it  does  from  a  man  of 
fifty  who,  all  his  life,  had  been  a  passionate  devotee  of 
Fra  Angelico,  mediaeval  cathedrals,  Tintoretto,  and 
Turner.  The  merits  of  Greek  art,  he  says,  are  "  sound 
knowledge — simple  aims — mastered  craft — vivid  inven- 
tion— strong  common  sense — true  and  wise  meaning — 
and,  above  all,  coolness,  everlasting  calm."  Not  that 
Greek  art  is  so  beautiful,  but  it  is  so  right.  All  that  it 
desires  to  do  it  does,  and  all  that  it  does,  does  well. 
Its  self-restraint  is  marvellous,  its  peace  of  heart,  its 
contentment;  "sincere  and  innocent  purpose,  strong 
common  sense  and  principle,  and  all  the  strength  that 
comes  of  these,  and  all  the  grace  that  follows  on 
that  strength."  And  yet,  he  will  not  give  the  crown 
of  wild  olive  even  to  the  Aphrodite  of  Melos,  "who 
could  not  hold  her  own  against  a  simple  English 
girl,  of  pure  race  and  kind  heart."  And  the  sweet 
cherub  heads  by  Sir  Joshua  Keynolds  at  Kensington 
"is  an  incomparably  finer  thing  than  ever  the  Greek 
did." 

And  so  these  years  passed  in  varied  occupations — 
much   travellincr  in   France,    Switzerland,   and   North 


IX.]  THE  ETHICS  OF  WORK  AND  OF  ART  119 

Italy,  back  again  to  his  beloved  English  lakes,  in 
geologising,  drawing,  studying  minerals,  writing  letters, 
and  continual  lectures.  In  1867  he  was  the  Rede 
lecturer  in  the  Senate  House  at  Cambridge.  His 
subject  was  the  same  topic  on  which  he  was  now  con- 
tinuously absorbed — ''The  Relation  of  National  Ethics 
to  National  Arts."  It  has  not  yet  been  published  ;  but 
so  far  as  we  can  judge  from  the  reports  in  the  journals, 
it  was  composed  in  a  more  conventional  style  than 
usual  with  him,  and  was  more  in  the  vein  of  a 
university  sermon  than  a  professor's  lecture.  He 
warned  the  undergraduates  to  remember  "  the  infinite 
importance  of  a  life  of  virtue,  and  the  fact  that  the 
hereafter  must  be  spent  in  God's  presence  or  in  dark- 
ness." To  the  Dons  he  said  their  prosperity  must 
depend  on  their  diligence  in  executing  "the  solemn 
trust  given  to  them  in  the  proving  of  youth — 'Lead 
them  not  into  temptation,  but  deliver  them  from  evil' " 
We  trust  this  appeal  to  heads  of  houses  and  tutors 
was  a  counsel  of  perfection.  His  father  always  said 
that  John  Ruskin  "ought  to  have  been  a  Bishop."  In 
spite  of  his  own  nolo  episcopari,  he  was  always  and 
everywhere  the  Overseer  of  souls,  and  never  more  than 
in  these  lat^r  years.  But  perhaps  some  parts  of  this 
report  may  be  the  stenographer's  commonplace. 

In  1865-66  the  sanguinary  suppression  of  a  negro  riot 
in  Jamaica,  and  the  summary  execution  of  Gordon  by 
Grovernor  Eyre,  roused  fierce  indignation,  and  com- 
mittees were  formed  to  prosecute  —  and  to  defend 
Mr.  Eyre.  Carlyle,  always  on  the  side  of  martial  law 
and  against  the  slave,  dragged  Ruskin  into  the  Eyre 
defence,  which  he  warmly  supported,  and  to  which  he 
subscribed  £100.     It  was  startling  to  some  persons  to 


120  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap.  ix. 

find  the  author  of  Unto  this  Last,  this  "merciful,  just, 
and  godly  "  person,  on  the  side  of  lawless  oppression 
of  the  weak.  But  his  Tory  instincts  and  the  influence 
of  Carlyle  may  account  for  this  and  much  more. 

In  1871,  Miss  Agnew  was  married  to  Arthur  Severn 
and  left  Denmark  Hill.  In  the  same  year  Ruskin 
bought  the  house  and  property  of  Brantwood  on 
Lake  Coniston,  "the  finest  \aew  in  Cumberland  or 
Lancashire."  In  December  of  that  year  his  mother 
died  at  the  age  of  ninety,  infirm  of  body,  nearly  blind, 
but  still  resolute  in  spirit,  and  mistress  of  her  home. 
The  son  had  loved  her,  submitted  to  her,  and  mourned 
her  "  with  a  surprising  sense  of  loneliness."  He  buried 
her  in  his  father's  grave  at  Shirley,  and  inscribed  over 
it,  "  Nor  was  dearer  earth  ever  returned  to  earth,  nor 
purer  life  recorded  in  heaven." 

Ruskin,  now  almost  fifty-three  years  old,  was  at  last 
alone ;  he  withdrew  to  a  new  and  distant  home,  and  a 
new  phase  of  his  life  was  begun  with  his  career  as 
professor  at  Oxford, 


CHAPTER    X 

SLADE  PROFESSOR — OXFORD — LECTURES 

In  August  1869  Ruskin  was  elected  Slade  Professor 
of  Art  at  the  University  of  Oxford,  almost  it  would 
seem  as  a  surprise  to  himself.  In  February  1870  (he 
was  then  fifty-one)  he  gave  his  first  lecture  in  the 
Sheldonian  Theatre.  The  crowds  to  hear  him  had  been 
so  great  that  the  lecture  had  to  be  removed  from  the 
Museum,  which  was  not  large  enough  to  contain  them. 
In  January  1873  he  was  re-elected  for  another  term 
of  three  years,  and  again  in  1876  for  a  third  term. 
Ill-health  and  incapacity  to  fulfil  his  work  forced  him 
then  to  resign.  Again,  in  1883  he  was  re-elected  in 
succession  to  Sir  "W.  Richmond,  but  he  resigned  again 
at  the  end  of  1884.  His  Oxford  Professorship  had 
lasted  for  upwards  of  ten  years,  between  1870  and 
1884,  and  this  latter  date  was  practically  the  last  of 
his  public  utterances ;  and,  but  for  Prceterita  and  a  few 
casual  pieces,  marks  the  last  of  his  literary  work. 
Certain  of  his  Oxford  lectures,  at  least  in  the  first 
part  of  his  time  and  for  those  into  which  he  threw 
his  best,  were  as  effective  and  valuable  as  anything  he 
ever  had  done.  His  method  was  unconventional, 
familiar,  oft^n  humorous,  and  always  intensely  char- 
acteristic. He  usually  had  drawings,  specimens,  dia- 
grams, and  figures  to  illustrate  his  argument,  and  with 

121 


122  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

these  he  extemporised  a  rich  flow  of  ideas,  comments, 
and  fancies.  At  the  outset  of  his  course,  and  usually 
at  the  opening  of  each  lecture,  he  read  carefully 
written  passages,  such  as  might  be  found  in  Modern 
Painters',  but  no  lecture  was  ever  left  a  mere  essay 
formally  read. 

It  has  been  well  said  that  E-uskin  as  Professor  ful- 
filled all  the  four  conditions  for  which  a  Professorship 
may  be  used — research,  ornament,  general  instruction, 
and  professional  teaching.  If  people  outside  thought 
that  the  office  gave* him  new  honours,  if  his  family 
and  his  intimates  always  henceforth  knew  him  and 
spoke  of  him  as  "The  Professor,"  it  is  certain  that  all 
that  was  best  in  Oxford  held  that  his  part  in  it  con- 
ferred an  honour  and  a  new  force  on  the  University 
itself.  His  Oxford  lectures  were  ultimately  issued  in 
the  books  with  the  following  titles :  Lectures  on  Art 
(of  1870),  Aratra  Pentelici  (1870),  Michael  Angelo  and 
Tintoret  (1870),  the  Eagle's  Nest  (1872),  Ariadne  Floren- 
tina  (1872),  Love's  Meinie  (1873),  Val  d'Arno  (1873),  the 
Art  of  England  (1873),  the  Pleasures  of  England  (1884). 
And  by  way  of  professional  teaching  he  issued,  for  the 
use  of  travellers  in  Italy,  a  series  of  foreign  guide- 
books :  Mornings  in  Florence,  St.  Mark's  Best,  the  Academy 
of  Fine  Arts  in  Venice. 

Mr.  Edward  T.  Cook,  one  of  the  Professor's  most 
distinguished  pupils,  and  his  biographer,  tells  us  in 
words  that  are  best  recorded  in  his  quarto  Studies  in 
Buskin,  1890— 

"  The  charm  of  the  Living  Voice  in  Mr.  Euskin's  lectures 
was  as  potent  as  the  influence  of  the  Living  Teacher.  The 
published  volumes  of  these  lectures  are  amongst  the  more 
important,  as  they  are  the  most  closely  and  carefully  written 


X.J       SLADE  PROFESSOR— OXFORD-LECTimES      123 

of  his  works.  But  they  convey  to  the  reader  only  a  faint  echo 
of  the  fascination  they  exercised  over  the  hearer.  ['That 
singular  voice  of  his,'  Mr.  Mallock  says,  '  which  would  often 
hold  all  the  theatre  breathless,  haunts  me  still.'] 

"Mr.  Ruskin  is,  indeed,  no  orator.  His  eloquence  Is 
studied,  not  spontaneous — the  eloquence  of  a  writer,  not  of 
a  speaker.  His  voice,  though  sympathetic,  is  neither  strong 
nor  penetrating.  Of  action  he  has  little  or  none.  But  one 
quality,  which  is  essential  to  a  successful  speaker,  Mr.  Ruskin 
possesses  to  the  full— the  quality  of  a  striking  personality. 
No  one  who  ever  attended  his  Oxford  lectures  is  likely  to 
forget  the  bent  figure  with  the  ample  gown — discarded  often 
when  its  folds  became  too  hopelessly  involved — and  the  velvet 
college  cap,  one  of  the  few  remaining  memorials  of  the  '  gentle- 
man commoner.'  .  .  .  The  quaintness  of  his  costume— the 
light  home-spun  tweed,  the  double-breasted  waistcoat,  the  ill- 
fitting  and  old-fashioned  frock-coat,  the  amplitude  of  inevit- 
able blue  tie — accurately  reflected  something  of  the  quaintness 
of  his  mind  and  talk.  If  it  were  not  for  the  peculiarly  delicate 
hands  and  tapering  fingers,  denoting  the  artistic  temperament, 
the  Oxford  professor  might  have  been  taken  for  an  old- 
fashioned  country  gentleman.  In  repose,  Mr.  Ruskin's  face 
has  of  recent  years  been  furrowed  into  sadness  ;  but  the  blue 
eyes,  piercing  from  beneath  thick,  bushy  eyebrows,  have  never 
ceased  to  shine  with  the  fire  of  genius  ;  whilst  the  smile  that 
was  never  long  absent  when  he  lectured,  lit  up  his  face  with 
the  radiance  of  a  singularly  gracious  and  gentle  spirit." 

"The  Lectures  on  Art,"  with  which  the  Oxford 
courses  opened,  were  among  the  most  serious  and 
thoughtful  of  Ruskin's  deliverances.  Art,  artists,  and 
art-work  formed  the  text,  the  illustrations,  and  the 
digressions.  In  substance  they  were  homilies  on  educa- 
tion, sincerity  of  life,  noble  ideals  of  conduct,  and  the 
spirit  of  religion.  They  are  full  of  denunciation  of 
modern  \ailgarity  and  avarice,  of  satiric  touches,  and 
pathetic  wailing  over  the  hardness  of  heart  and  coarse- 


124  JOHN  RUSKIN  [ckat. 

ness  of  tone  in  British  society  of  to-day.  They  might 
have  "been  sermons  from  a  University  pulpit  rather  than 
discourses  from  a  professor's  chair.  The  refrain  of  the 
first  is  the  old  moral  that  great  Art  cannot  grow  up 
in  a  rotten  world.  Whether  the  title  be  Art  and 
Religion,  Art  and  Morals,  Art  and  Useful  Service,  it 
is  the  same  theme — one  that  the  founder  of  the  Slade 
Professorship  did  not  perhaps  intend,  but  one  that  since 
the  close  of  Modern  Painters  Ruskin  had  perpetually 
enforced,  with  more  or  less  exaggeration,  but  with  all 
the  fervour  that  was  in  him,  as  when  he  said,  "  You 
live  in  an  age  of  base  conceit  and  baser  servility — an 
age  whose  intellect  is  chiefly  formed  by  pillage,  and 
occupied  in  desecration ;  one  day  mimicking,  the  next 
destroying,  the  works  of  all  the  noble  persons  who 
made  its  intellectual  or  art  life  possible  to  it."  >' 

After  this  tremendous  jeremiad,  the  Professor  turned 
to  Art;  and  in  the  course  of  Mich.  1870,  now  called 
Aratra  Pentelici,  he  gave  six  lectures,  more  or  less 
directly  concerned  with  the  relations  of  the  arts  to 
each  other,  about  Idolatry  and  Imagination,  in  other 
words,  ideals  and  symbols,  likeness,  and  structure  in 
art  representation,  and  a  comparison  of  the  distinctive 
marks  of  the  best  work  of  Athens  and  of  Florence  in 
sculpture.  These  lectures,  graceful  in  expression,  fertile 
in  suggestion,  and  original  in  thought,  are  a  joy  to  read, 
and  were  a  genuine  example  of  sound  professional 
guidance,  both  in  the  way  of  judgment  and  of  research. 
They  contain  also  some  of  his  wittiest  and  some  of  his 
most  eloquent  sayings,  and  were  illustrated  with  some 
admirable  drawings,  photographs,  and  diagrams.  "  Art, 
instead  of  being  foreign  to  deep  questions  of  social 
duty  and  peril,  is  vitally  connected  with  them."     He 


X.]       SLADE  PROFESSOR— OXFORD— LECTURES       125 

is  so  deeply  stirred  by  the  European  war  (Nov.  1870) 
that  he  occupies  his  mind  ^vith  the  technique  of  Sculp- 
ture rather  than  general  principles  of  Art.  For  illus- 
tration, he  holds  up  a  breakfast  plate  and  dilates  on  its 
roundness,  its  rim,  its  ridge  underneath,  the  one  serving 
as  continuous  handle,  the  other  as  continuous  leg.  Then 
for  ornament,  the  plate  has  six  roses  painted  on  its 
rim,  and  from  the  breakfast  plate  the  Professor  turns 
rapidly  to  the  Porch  of  San  Zenone  at  Verona,  of  which 
he  exhibits  a  beautiful  photograph ;  and  thence,  by  a 
transition  easy  only  to  John  Euskin,  we  are  taken  to 
the  lovely  coin  of  Syracuse,  the  head  of  Arethusa  by 
Cimon. 

"There  is  no  instance  of  fine  sculpture  being  pro- 
duced by  a  nation,  either  torpid,  weak,  or  in  decadence. 
Their  drama  may  gain  in  grace  and  wit;  but  their 
sculpture,  in  days  of  decline,  is  always  base."  Cela 
donne  a  reflSchir,  when  we  remember  that  the  model  for 
Praxiteles'  Aphrodite  was  Phryne,  and  that  Michael 
Angelo  worked  for  the  Popes  and  Princes  of  the  six- 
teenth century.  "The  Greek  school  of  sculptors  is 
formed  during,  and  in  consequence  of,  the  national 
effort  to  discover  the  nature  of  justice."  One  wonders 
that  the  very  name  of  the  Aphrodite  of  Melos  did  not 
remind  the  Professor  of  the  horrible  sentence  of  the 
Athenian  Demos  on  the  Melian  people.  "All  the  arts, 
founded  on  religion,  and  sculpture  chiefly,  are  here  in 
England  effete  and  corrupt  to  a  degree  which  arts  never 
were  hitherto  in  the  history  of  mankind."  This,  by  the 
way,  at  the  time  that  Alfred  Stevens  was  executing  the 
grand  monument  of  Wellington  in  St.  Paul's  Cathedral. 

But  in  spite  of  these  outbursts  from  a  man  whose 
intensely  sensitive   nerves  were   being   daily  torn  to 


126  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

shreds,  we  need  not  forget  how  much  of  truth  and  of 
charm  is  embodied  in  these  fiery  darts  into  the  soul 
of  Greek  and  Florentine  sculpture.  "The  Greeks 
were  the  first  people  who  were  born  into  complete 
humanity  "  j  they  looked  for  the  first  time  "  with  their 
children's  eyes,  wonderingly  open,  on  the  strange  and 
divine  world."  "The  first  thing  you  will  ahvays 
discern  in  Greek  work  is  the  first  which  you  ought 
to  discern  in  all  work;  namely,  that  the  object  of  it 
has  been  rational,  and  has  been  obtained  by  simple 
and  unostentatious  means."  "The  modern  sculptor 
thinks  in  clay  instead  of  marble."  The  Greeks  per- 
fectly moulded  the  human  body  and  limbs ;  but  they 
did  not  represent  the  face  as  well  as  amy  great  Italian. 
Whereas,  the  Italian  painted  and  carved  the  face 
insuperably ;  but  there  is  no  instance  of  his  having  per- 
fectly represented  the  body,  which  by  command  of 
his  religion  it  became  his  pride  to  despise  and  his 
safety  to  mortify.  One  must  give  a  very  strict  meaning 
to  the  term  "perfectly"  in  order  to  understand  this 
dictum,  so  as  to  make  the  head  of  the  Olympian  Zeus 
of  Pheidias  short  of  perfect,  as  also  the  three  Graces 
of  Raphael  or  the  Venus  of  Titian  imperfect.  But 
Ruskin  evidently  means  that  no  Greek  head  known 
to  us  had  the  expression  of  Leonardo's  Christ,  nor 
had  Titian'^  Bacchus  or  his  voluptuous  duchess  the 
grand  forms  of  Theseus  or  of  the  Melian  Aphrodite. 
The  Greek  never  expresses  momentary  passion ;  a 
Florentine  looks  to  it  as  the  ultimate  object  of  his 
skill.  A  Greek  never  expresses  personal  character; 
a  Florentine  holds  it  to  be  the  ultimate  condition  of 
beauty.  The  Greeks  do  not  give  ideal  beauty — the 
Venus  of  Melos  has  dignity,  simplicity,  but  not  the 


X.]       SLADE  PROFESSOR— OXFORD— LECTURES       127 

beauty  of  an  English  girl.  Nor  do  the  Greeks  present 
mystery  or  pathos.  The  strength  of  the  Greek  was 
in  Rightness — the  thing  portrayed  in  its  simplicity. 
The  Greek,  in  a  word,  is  the  author  of  all  broad, 
mighty,  and  calm  conception,  and  of  what  is  subtle, 
delicate,  and  varied. 

The  Eagle's  Nest  (1872),  a  book  which  Carlyle  liked 
best,  was  a  course  on  the  metaphysics  of  the  aesthetic 
and  moral  faculties  rather  than  on  Art  proper.  It  was 
so  named  in  the  same  way  of  fancy,  in  that  it  contains 
much  about  birds,  at  least  twelve  different  species 
being  mentioned,  and  something  about  eagles.  "What 
eagles'  nests  have  to  do  ^\ath  the  teaching  of  Art  is 
Ruskin's  secret.  And  this  perhaps  few  of  his  under- 
graduate hearers  (to  whom  they  were  specially  addressed 
as  definite  studies)  quite  succeeded  in  solving.  But 
as  usual  there  is  much  besides  birds  in  this  course — 
Dr.  Acland's  dog  "Bustle,"  the  Alabama  arbitration, 
armorial  bearings  and  heraldic  "  ordinaries,"  two  young 
ladies  studying  astronomy,  forty  texts  from  the  Bible, 
the  dangers  of  studying  anatomy,  dancing  at  the 
Gaiety  Theatre,  the  famine  in  Orissa,  dwellings  for 
the  working  classes,  drawing  from  the  living  nude,  the 
Victoria  Tower  at  Westminster,  and  the  battle  of  the 
Lake  Regillus, — all  this  in  240  paragraphs,  and  ajpropos 
(not  de  hotteSj  but)  of  Eagles. 

The  first  five  lectures  are  devoted  to  the  Greek  con- 
ception of  o-o^ta,  ar(i}(j>po(rvvr),  and  auTa/OK€ia,  and  they 
somewhat  trespass  on  the  preserves  of  the  Regius 
Professor  of  Greek,  and  of  the  Waynflete  Professor 
of  Moral  and  Metaphysical   Philosophy.     But,  given 


128  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

Euskin's  fanciful  and  discursive  methods,  they  have 
some  suggestive  thoughts  in  exquisite  words  as  to  the 
relations  of  Science,  Art,  and  Literature,  interwoven 
with  some  quaint  references  to  Homer,  Aristotle,  Shake- 
speare, Chaucer,  Goethe,  and  Blake,  and  some  lovely 
fantasies  about  the  instinct  and  songs  of  birds.  The 
argument,  scintillating  as  it  does  with  bright  fancies 
and  allusions,  is  not  very  easy  to  follow ;  but  it 
amounts  to  this :  that  the  business  of  Art  is  to  repre- 
sent what  is  visible,  not  to  give  a  scientific  explanation 
of  what  a  thing  is  composed  of,  what  may  be  inside  it 
and  invisible,  much  less  how  it  came  about.  Three 
thousand  years  have  passed  since  the  age  of  Ulysses, 
who  resisted  the  temptation  of  the  Sirens  to  "learn 
new  wisdom,"  and  we  are  still  eager  to  add  to  our 
knowledge  rather  than  to  use  it,  passionate  in  discover- 
ing, every  day  more  cold  in  admiration  and  more  dull 
in  reverence.  And  much  more  to  the  same  effect,  as 
the  undergraduates  so  often  heard  from  the  University 
pulpit. 

When  it  comes  to  advice  as  to  drawing,  Ruskin 
earnestly  protests  against  any  intrusion  of  science  upon 
art ;  and  here  he  obviously  means  science  as  professed 
in  the  orthodox  method,  for  he  throws  in  a  great  deal 
of  science  of  his  own  devising.  That  is  a  capital  story 
of  the  old  sea  captain  who  complained  to  Turner  that 
in  a  drawing  of  Plymouth  Harbour  he  had  given  the 
ships  no  port-holes.  "  No,"  said  the  painter,  "  you  cannot 
see  the  port-holes.  My  business  is  to  draw  what  I 
see,  not  what  I  know  is  there."  "  Art  has  nothing  to 
do,"  said  Ruskin,  "with  structures,  causes,  or  absolute 
facts;  but  only  ^vith  appearances."  Hence  the  study 
of  Anatomy  is  an  impediment  to  graphic  Art.    Michael 


X.]       SLADE  PROFESSOR— OXFORD— LECTURES      129 

Angelo,  Botticelli,  Diirer,  and  Mantegna  were  injured 
by  their  scientific  knowledge  of  the  skeleton  and  the 
anatomy  beneath  the  skin  of  their  fignres.  They  con- 
tinually would  draw,  not  what  could  be  seen,  but  what 
they  knew  was  underneath  the  exterior.  Mantegna 
and  Diirer  "were  polluted  and  paralysed"  by  their 
study  of  anatomy.  And  even  the  study  of  the  nude 
form,  beyond  what  is  shoAvn  in  daily  life,  is  injurious 
to  the  art  of  painting  or  of  sculpture — for  instance, 
Mulready's  life  studies  are  vulgar  and  abominable. 
This,  it  seems,  on  the  ground  that,  though  such  studies 
represent  what  the  draughtsman  sees,  they  are  not  what 
the  public  sees  or  knows;  and  thus  they  disturb  the 
mind  with  what  is  neither  familiar  nor  pleasing.  And 
it  seems  that,  on  similar  grounds,  the  Professor  would 
banish  copying  the  antique  from  elementary  drawing- 
schools.  For  a  young  boy  or  girl  to  stare  at  the  Elgin 
marbles  is  enough  to  make  the  youthful  temper  "rotten 
with  afiectation,  and  sickly  with  strained  and  ambitious 
fancy."  It  is  even  worse  for  young  persons  to  endure 
the  horror  of  the  dissecting-room,  or  be  made  familiar 
with  the  bodily  form  in  climates  where,  owing  to  the 
use  of  clothing,  the  body  is  not  perfect  in  shape, 
and  cannot  be  viewed  unclothed  with  entirely  simple 
feeling. 

When  we  come  to  Ariadne  Florentina  (lectures  of 
1872),  we  reach  more  strictly  artistic  studies;  indeed, 
they  are  on  the  technique  of  Wood  and  Metal  Engrav- 
ing. They  are  mainly  occupied  with  subtle  analyses 
of  the  methods  employed  by  Botticelli,  Diirer,  Holbein, 
Bewick,  and  Tenniel.  There  is  much  of  refined  criti- 
cism  in  all  this,  but  it  is  far  too  technical  to  be  here 

I 


130  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

examined,  especially  without  those  elaborate  drawings 
and  photographs  which  gave  such  interest  to  the 
spoken  lectures.  One  shrinks  from  the  task  of  reports 
ing,  or  defending,  or  criticising  the  Professor's  analysis 
of  the  engraver's  triumphs  and  failures — often  striking, 
sometimes  fanciful,  and  usually  suggestive,  as  it  all  is. 
Holbein's  Dance  of  Death  is  a  subject  in  which  Ruskin 
naturally  would  revel.  You  may  learn  more,  he  says, 
by  trying  to  engrave  the  tip  of  an  ear  or  the  curl  of 
a  lock  of  hair  than  by  photographing  the  entire  popula- 
tion of  the  United  States  of  America.  Unfortunately, 
all  that  the  public  demand  of  engravings  to-day  is 
Ramsgate  Sands,  Dolly  Vardens,  and  the  Paddington 
Station— that  is  the  public  itself. 

The  volume  on  German  and  Florentine  engravers 
has  far  less  of  the  disquisitions  on  Morals  and  Philo- 
sophy than  the  Professor's  other  lectures ;  but  there  is 
a  striking  passage,  at  the  opening  of  the  fifth  lecture, 
which  sums  up  Ruskin's  feeling  about  the  Renascence, 
or  Eenaissance,  as  he  -will  call  it,  in  the  fifteenth  cen- 
tury. Three  great  passions  "  then  perturbed  or  polluted 
Europe  "  :— 

1.  The  thirst  for  classical  literature,  and  the  proud 

and  false  taste  created  by  it  when  it  assumed 
to  be  the  enemy  of  Christianity. 

2.  The  pride  of  science,  enforcing  accuracy  of  per- 

spective, shade,  and  anatomy,  never  before 
dreamed  of. 

3.  The  sense  of  error  and  iniquity  in  the  teaching 

of  the  Christian  Church. 

To  put  it  more  shortly — (1)  Classicism  and  Literary 
Science;  (2)  Medicine  and  Physical  Science;  (3)  The 


X.]       SLADE  PROFESSOR— OXFORD— LECTURES      131 

Reformation  and  Religious  Science.  One  may  wonder 
where,  mthout  these  great  polluting  passions,  would 
have  been  Tintoretto,  Titian,  Turner,  and  Reynolds, 
where  would  Oxford  have  been,  and  where  would  be 
nine-tenths  of  the  Slade  Professor's  own  works  ? 

Liyve's  Meinie  is  the  written  form  of  four  Oxford 
lectures  of  1873.  'T would  be  a  pretty  game  to  dis- 
cover the  subject  from  this  cryptic  title,  and  one 
hundred  guesses  would  not  unriddle  it.  In  fact,  it  is 
about  "Greek  and  English  birds"— the  robin,  the 
swallow,  and  the  dabchicks;  and  "Meinie,"  it  seems, 
means  "  a  many,"  or  a  bevy,  or  flock,  or  crowd ;  and  to 
understand  the  full  sense  of  the  phrase,  we  must  turn 
to  the  Romance  of  the  Rose,  Chaucer,  St.  Francis,  and 
St.  Bernard.     The  motto  of  the  first  lecture  is  : — 

"  II  etait  tout  convert  d'oisiaulx, 
De  rossignols  et  de  papegaux." 

In  any  case,  it  is  a  charming  book,  to  be  read  alongside 
of  Jules  Michelet's  Oiseau.  But  there  is  hardly  one 
word  in  it  about  art,  artists,  or  artistic  studies.  Be- 
yond a  casual  phrase  about  Carpaccio  and  Holbein's 
drawing  of  birds,  we  get  little  about  birds  in  Art,  but 
much  about  birds  in  Nature.  Paolo  Uccelli  and 
Antonio  Pollajuolo  are  condemned  as  being  too  scien- 
tific. Benozzo  Gozzoli  and  fifteenth  century  tapestry 
are  not  mentioned,  nor  is  a  word  thrown  to  Raphael 
for  his  cardellino,  his  doves,  and  his  cranes. 

It  would  be  a  perilous  task  to  examine  the  scientific 
accuracy  of  Ruskin's  ornithology.  He  says  that  his 
two  hundred  pages  are  intended  to  contain  the  cream 
of  forty  volumes  of  scientific  ornithology,  and  he  has 
diligently  studied  the  standard  authorities  upon  birds. 


132  JOHN  RUSKIX  [chap. 

But  his  business  is  to  speak  of  what  we  can  see  of  birds, 
of  the  visible  facts  of  bird  life,  and  especially  of  bird 
life  as  the  poets,  ancient  and  modern,  have  known  it. 
And  as  a  prose  poet,  Ruskin  havS  thrown  together  a 
delicious  body  of  bright  thoughts  about  the  birds 
whom  he  loves  as  well  as  St.  Francis  himself.  The 
killing  of  birds  is  naturally  the  object  of  his  most 
'violent  condemnation.  The  chief  interest  of  the  leisure 
of  mankind  is  now  to  be  found  in  the  destruction  of 
the  creatures,  not  one  of  which  can  fall  to  the  ground 
without  our  Father's  ^vill.  It  is  becoming  the  only 
definition  of  aristocracy  that  the  principal  business  of 
its  life  is  the  kilKng  of  birds,  as  Carlyle's  epitaph  on 
Count  Zaehdarm  in  Sartor  runs — centum  mille  perdrices 
plumbo  confecitj  "too  often  the  sum  of  the  life  of  an 
English  lord." 

There  are  no  less  than  seventy-six  birds  spoken  of  in 
this  little  book;  but,  except  quite  incidentally,  the 
singing  birds  are  hardly  treated,  nor  is  there  much 
more  about  the  kingfisher,  the  swan,  the  pheasant,  or 
the  peacock.  We  must  take  Ruskin  as  we  find  him ; 
and  if  he  chooses  to  confine  himself  to  the  visible 
movements  of  a  few  common  birds,  and  to  a  few  notices 
of  them  in  the  poets,  we  may  be  thankful  and  enjoy 
what  we  get.  The  purpose  of  the  course  is  to  stimulate 
careful  observation  of  birds  in  motion,  of  their  action, 
plumage,  and  habits.  The  delight  he  feels  in  watching 
birds  on  the  wing,  hopping,  dabbling,  or  diving,  serves 
to  draw  off  his  mind  from  the  cruel  tale  of  social  wrong 
and  modem  vulgarity  which  had  so  long  settled  on 
him.  But  there  are  moments  when  it  breaks  forth,  as 
when  he  solemnly  reprints  that  fierce  passage  from 
Modern  Painters^  vol.  ii.  :  how  he  knows  not  of  "  anv- 


X.]       SLADE  PROFESSOR— OXFORD— LECTURES      133 

thing  more  destructive  of  the  Christian  character  and 
human  intellect  than  those  accursed  sports,  in  which 
man  makes  of  himself  cat,  tiger,  serpent,  choetedon, 
and  alligator  in  one ;  and  gathers  into  one  continuance 
of  cruelty,  for  his  amusement,  all  the  devices  that 
brutes  sparingly,  and  at  intervals,  use  against  each 
other  for  their  necessities.''  He  repeats  this  scathing 
attack  on  sport  after  thirty-five  years,  and  adds  that 
every  hour  of  his  life  since  has  increased  his  sense 
"of  the  bitterness  of  the  curse,  which  the  habits 
of  hunting  and  'la  chasse'  have  brought  upon  the 
so-called  upper  classes  of  England  and  of  France; 
until,  from  knights  and  gentlemen,  they  have  sunk 
into  jockeys,  speculators,  usurers,  butchers  by  battue, 
etc.,  etc." 

One  cannot  understand  Euskin's  life,  unless  we 
realise  how  the  graceful  gossip  about  robins  and 
swallows  leads  in  his  mind  straight  to  this  bitter 
anathema  on  modern  life.  Only,  one  wonders  what 
the  young  gentlemen,  to  whom  it  was  addressed, 
thought  of  it,  and  also  what  it  has  to  do  with  the 
academic  courses  of  a  Slade  Professor  of  the  Fine  Arts. 
But  one  reads  Ruskin  to  little  purpose  if  we  do  not 
feel  that,  to  him,  Art  was  dust  and  ashes,  except  that 
it  meant  true  life.  It  may  be  that  some  of  the  young 
men  listened  to  him  more  willingly  than  to  those  who 
directly  assumed  to  preach  the  Gospel,  when  he  closed 
this  course  with  the  words :  "  The  inhabited  world  in 
sea  and  land  should  be  one  vast  unwalled  park  and 
treasure  lake,  in  which  its  flocks  of  sheep,  or  deer,  or 
fowl,  or  fish,  should  be  tended  and  dealt  with,  as  best 
may  multiply  the  life  of  all  Love's  Meinie,  in  strength, 
and  use,  and  peace." 


134  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

Val  d'Arno  professes  to  be  ten  lectures  of  1873  on 
Tuscan  Art  down  to  the  age  of  Dante ;  but  it  contains 
more  about  Tuscan  History  than  Tuscan  Art.  Opening 
with  a  fine  sketch  of  the  marvellous  influences  of 
Niccolo  Pisano,  who  brought  into  mediseval  Europe  the 
smouldering  torch  of  Greek  art ;  and  then  turning  to 
John  of  Pisa,  the  Professor  rapidly  passes  into  the 
story  of  Florence  and  Pisa,  Manfred  and  Charles  of 
Anjou,  all  of  which  is  touched  in  a  suggestive,  and 
somewhat  desultory  and  mystical  manner,  with  much 
about  Dante,  the  heraldic  banners  of  the  city  quarters, 
florins,  palaces,  towers,  and  Cyclopean  masonry.  A 
typical  example  of  Euskin's  habit  of  discursive  or 
"  jumble  "  lecturing  may  be  seen  by  an  analysis  of  the 
eighth  lecture  on  "Franchise."  Franchise,  of  course, 
has  nothing  to  do  with  privileges  or  suffrages.  It  is 
equivalent  to  lihertas,  not  "liberty,"  such  as  Mr.  John 
Stuart  Mill's,  nor  is  it  "liberte,"  such  as  M.  Victor 
Hugo's ;  but  rather  freedom  from  fear  and  temptation, 
obedience  to  law,  the  truly  kingly  nature,  as  that  of 
our  Edward  in.  or  of  Theseus  at  Athens. 

The  Professor  begins  by  contrasting  the  Lion  of 
St.  Mark's  at  Venice  with  that  of  Niccolo  of  Pisa,  i.e. 
the  Byzantine  with  the  Gothic;  the  Greek  art  being 
pious,  the  Gothic  profane,  for  the  Byzantines  gave  law 
to  Norman  license.  Theseus  is  every  inch  a  king  as 
well  as  Edward  in. ;  the  function  of  a  Greek  king  was 
to  enforce  labour;  that  of  a  Gothic  king  to  restrain 
rage.  Greek  law  is  of  Stasy,  and  Gothic  of  Ec-stasy. 
Theseus  and  Edward  in.  are  warriors,  as  we  know; 
but  they  are  also  theologians,  didactic  kings,  rather 
philologians,  lovers  of  the  Logos,  by  which  the  heavens 
and  earth  were  made.    The  Byzantine  lion  is  descended 


X.]       SLADE  PROFESSOR— OXFORD— LECTURES      135 

from  the  Nemean  Greek  lion.  Theseus  becomes 
St.  Athanase.  If  a  bird  flies  under  the  reign  of  law 
and  a  cricket  sings  under  the  compulsion  of  caloric, 
perhaps  the  position  of  a  college  boat  on  the  river 
depends  on  law,  and  the  Dies  Irce  is  to  be  announced 
by  a  steam  trumpet  1  The  sheets  of  the  daily  press  in 
a  single  year  would  serve  to  enwrap  the  world.  Read 
fifty-two  lines  from  the  Deserted  Fillage.  Greek  Art  is 
all  parable,  but  Gothic  is  literal.  Turner  belonged  to 
the  Greek  school ;  his  scarlet  clouds  are  a  sign  of  death. 
Sir  Walter  Scott's  Diana  Vernon  is  a  symbol  of  Fran- 
chise— "ver  non  semper  viret."  "A\Tiat  Diana  Vernon 
is  to  a  French  ballerine  dancing  the  Cancan,  the 
'libertas'  of  Chartres  and  "Westminster  is  to  the 
liberty  of  M.  Victor  Hugo  and  John  Stuart  Mill." 

All  this  is  put  down  in  pure  and  lucid  English, 
melodious  and  incisive,  \Wth  wonderful  flashes  of  in- 
sight and  of  sarcasm ;  but  it  is  difficult  to  see  to  what 
it  amounts  in  the  sum,  except  it  be  a  querulous  diatribe 
against  all  that  we  call  liberalism  or  science.  And  it  is 
even  more  difficult  to  see  how  it  could  advance  the  study 
of  the  Fine  Arts,  except  by  some  casual  phrase  about  a 
carving  or  a  picture.  The  incoherence  of  the  successive 
ideas  is  carried  almost  to  the  point  of  nonsense.  The 
separate  sentences  have  a  meaning,  even  if  it  be  only 
mystical  and  fanciful,  indeed  they  often  have  a  preg- 
nant hint  and  even  a  true  thought  -vvithin  them ;  but 
they  flash  past  each  other  Avith  the  inconsequence  of 
the  famous  wedding  party  attended  by  the  Joblillies 
and  the  Great  Panjandrum  himself.  The  lecture  as  a 
whole  resembles  the  kaleidoscopic  pictures  of  a  dream, 
wherein  no  single  incident  has  any  relation  to  that 
which  precedes  it  or  that  which  follows  it.     It  is  but 


136  JOHN  RUSKIN  [cHAr. 

too  obrious  that  at  this  period  the  Professor's  nervous 
system,  overstrained  and  morbidly  excited,  was  driving 
the  brain  at  excess,  and  was  leading  this  fine  genius  to 
an  inevitable  collapse. 

This  is  more  or  less  the  character  of  the  later  Oxford 
courses  of  the  Professor.  The  incoherence  had  been 
growing  from  the  first.  He  never  submitted  to  regard 
his  chair  as  one  in  which  he  was  to  confine  himself  to 
teaching  or  studying  Art.  He  was  to  be  moralist, 
philosopher,  lawgiver,  prophet  —  or  nothing.  If  he 
taught  dra^ving,  it  was  only  to  show  how  drawing  was 
a  school  for  the  virtues  of  truth,  industry,  and  obedience. 
If  he  spoke  of  painters,  it  was  to  show  how  completely 
independent  of  science  great  artists  were,  how  impos- 
sible was  it  to  paint  v,dthout  loyalty,  sincerity,  and 
religion.  Original  and  heterodox  as  his  science  was, 
we  come  from  time  to  time  on  intuitions  of  scientific 
truth,  which  strike  us  like  those  we  meet  in  the  poetry 
of  Shakespeare  or  of  Goethe. 

Curiously  scanty  and  desultory  as  his  scholarship 
had  been  as  a  student,  we  are  continually  struck  in  the 
Oxford  lectures  wath  the  range  of  reading,  the  subtle 
comments,  and  the  force  of  sympathy  with  which  he 
had  reached  the  inmost  soul  of  so  many  classical  writers, 
both  prose  and  verse,  Roman  as  well  as  Greek.  Nor 
has  any  Professor  of  Greek,  of  Poetry,  or  of  Philo- 
sophy, touched  with  a  wand  of  such  magic  power  so 
many  inimitable  passages  of  Homer,  Hesiod,  ^Eschylus, 
Pindar,  Aristophanes,  Plato,  Aristotle,  Xenophon, 
Lucian;  or  again  of  Virgil,  Horace,  and  Catullus. 
The  Slade  Professor  may  have  taught  the  students 
little  enough  of  Fine  Art  by  his  oml  lectures ;  but  he 
gave  even  the  dullest  and  most  imimaginative  of  his 


X.]      SLADE  PROFESSOR— OXFORD— LECTURES     137 

hearers  new  ideas  of  the  place  of  Art  in  Life,  higher 
ideals  of  both  Art  and  Life,  and  an  awakened  interest 
in  all  that  Art  might  come  to  mean,  if  it  were  lifted 
out  of  the  meanness  and  trading  spirit  in  which  it  is 
too  often  sunk.  Here  and  there  when  he  does  touch 
on  Art,  there  are  some  judgments  on  paintings  and 
painters  of  wonderful  acuteness  for  all  that  they  look 
so  paradoxical,  as  when  he  insists  that  Turner  belonged 
to  the  Greek  School.  And  when  he  is  not  thinking  of 
art  at  all,  there  are  passages  of  strange  pathos  and 
exquisite  beauty.  The  startling  paradoxes,  falling  in 
such  inexplicable  inconsequence,  at  least  roused  the 
mind  of  his  hearers,  and  taught  them  things  in  ways 
impossible  to  the  conventionally  obvious.  And  the 
Slade  Professor,  if  he  taught  Art  only  by  stray  crumbs 
that  fell  from  the  banquet  of  passionate  satire  on  which 
his  mind  fed,  at  least  planted  deep  in  the  hearts  and 
brains  of  a  few  chosen  men  ardent  ideals  of  a  better 
world,  and  the  yearning  desire  to  strive  towards  its 
attainment. 


CHAPTER    XI 

AT  OXFORD — WORK  AND   INFLUENCE 

These  lectures,  which  we  now  have  in  some  ten  hand- 
some volumes,  charged  with  many  hard  sayings  for  all 
but  esoteric  Ruskinians,  were  far  from  being  the  whole 
of  Ruskin's  work  at  Oxford,  and  perhaps  they  are  not 
the  best  or  the  most  important  part  of  it.  All  that  he 
did  or  said  at  Oxford,  whether  from  his  professorial 
chair  or  in  his  drawing  school,  in  his  college  rooms,  or 
in  the  country  round  about,  attracted  more  attention 
and  exerted  a  greater  influence  than  perhaps  ever  fell 
to  the  lot  of  any  academic  professor  of  that  age.  He 
founded  a  museum  of  art,  organised  a  drawing-school, 
formed  working  and  travelling  parties,  gathered 
students  around  him,  stimulated,  advised,  and  reproved 
them,  more  as  Abailard  or  Roger  Bacon  might  have 
done  in  a  mediaeval  University,  or  as  John  Wesley 
or  John  Henry  Newman  did  in  the  religious  world. 
He  trained  some  few  competent  draughtsmen ;  he  gave 
a  new  outlet  to  the  intellectual  activity  of  Oxford ;  and 
he  deeply  impressed  the  mind  of  some  men  who  have 
made  their  mark  in  literature,  such  as  Arnold  Toynbee, 
W.  H.  Mallock,  E.  T.  Cook,  W.  G.  Collingwood,  and 
many  more. 

When  he  opened  his  course  of  lectures  in  February 
1870,  the  throng  to  hear  him  was  such  that  it  could 

138 


CHAP.  XI.]  AT  OXFORD— WORK  AND  INFLUENCE     139 

only  be  seated  in  the  Sheldonian  Theatre;  and,  in 
spite  of  the  fact  that  undergraduates  have  never  been 
accustomed  to  attend  professorial  lectures  at  such 
hours,  and  were  usually  occupied  by  a  strict  time-table, 
the  crowd  of  his  hearers  was  continued  more  or  less  all 
through  his  Professorship,  even  at  his  last  term  in 
1883.  Much  of  this  eagerness  to  hear  him  was  no 
doubt  curiosity,  as  is  the  case  M-ith  miscellaneous 
lectures  of  the  kind.  And  much  of  w^hat  he  said  was 
more  or  less  unintelligible  to  some  of  those  who  came 
seriously  to  learn.  But  every  one  knows  that  the 
residuum  of  fruit  in  a  lecture  lies  usually  in  a  few 
pregnant  seeds  that  chance  to  fall  on  good  soil,  and] 
above  all  in  the  sympathetic  personality  of  the  lecturer.! 
E-uskin's  lectures  flung  about  broadcast  pregnant  seeds, 
and  his  personality  had  a  magnetic  influence  unsur- 
passed by  any  other  of  his  time.  Hence  it  is  that  his 
career  as  Slade  Professor  cannot  be  adequately  judged 
by  the  mere  reading  of  the  books,  where  too  often,  in 
the  absence  of  the  voice  and  the  illustrations,  the 
want  of  consecutive  thought  seems  so  crude  and 
uncomdncing. 

Ruskin  from  the  first  regarded  the  lecturing  as  only 
part  of  his  duties.  He  at  once  undertook  to  organise 
a  school  of  drav/ing,  not  to  train  men  to  make  in- 
dustrial designs  or  patterns,  or  to  become  professional 
artists,  but  to  get  some  practical  insight  into  the 
history  of  art  and  the  methods  of  the  great  masters;  but, 
above  all,  to  train  the  mind  and  eye  to  the  patient  and 
close  observation  of  nature.  For  the  use  of  his  school 
he  gave  a  collection  of  Turner's  drawings,  and  some  by 
Rossetti,  Holman  Hunt,  Burne-Jones,  and  many  of  his 
own,  and  some  pictures  by  Tintoretto,  Luini,  and  other 


140  JOHN  RUSKIN  [cHAr. 

masters,  and  he  added  engravings  and  casts.  Thus, 
out  of  his  own  purse,  and  by  his  personal  labour,  he 
formed  a  museum  to  be  the  nucleus  of  an  adequate 
school  of  drawing.  The  school  was  but  a  very 
moderate  success.  It  was  not  a  thing  which  easily 
worked  into  the  academic  habits  or  curriculum.  And 
from  first  to  last  the  object  of  it  was  not  to  train 
Oxford  students  to  make  themselves  artists,  but  to 
make  them  understand  what  Art  can  show  them  in  its 
relations  to  Nature  and  to  Human  Life. 

Besides  the  di-awing-school  which  he  so  munificently 
equipped,  he  made  himself  the  personal  friend,  guide, 
and  tutor  of  the  students  who  cared  to  come  round 
him.  As  he  said,  truly  and  sadly  enough,  of  lectures 
— the  hearers  come  to  be  entertained  rather  than  to 
learn — "to  be  excited  for  an  hour,  and,  if  possible, 
amused ;  to  get  the  knowledge  it  has  cost  a  man  half 
his  life  to  gather,  first  sweetened  up  to  make  it  palat- 
able, and  then  kneaded  into  the  smallest  possible  pills 
— and  to  swallow  it  homceopathically,  and  be  wise.  .  .  . 
It  is  not  to  be  done.  A  living  comment  quietly  given 
to  a  class  on  a  book  they  are  earnestly  reading — this 
kind  of  lecture  is  eternally  necessary  and  wholesome." 

So  he  gathered  the  men  about  him  and  got  them  to 
read.  He  started  a  library  of  Standard  Books  for 
popular  reading,  which  he  called  Bihliotheca  Fastorum 
— exactly  the  idea  of  Comte's  Positivist  Library,  as  it  is 
the  idea  of  Sir  John  Lubbock's  Best  Hundred  Boolcs. 
Kuskin  chose  to  begin  ^\ii\i  Xenophon's  CEconomicus,  a 
good  book  too  much  forgotten ;  and  this  he  engaged 
two  of  his  pupils  to  translate.  He  was  made  Honorary 
Fellow  of  Corpus  College,  as  well  as  Honorary  Student 
of  Christ  Church ;  and  Corpus  installed  him  in  a  set  of 


XI.  1         AT  OXFORD— WOPwK  AND  INFLUENCE         141 

rooms.  To  these  rooms  he  sent  his  great  Titian,  his 
Eaphael,  the  Turners,  and  Meissonier's  Napoleon ;  and 
here  he  would  keep  almost  open  house  to  his  intimates, 
working,  talking,  and  exhibiting  his  specimens  and 
treasures.  There  too  he  held  a  weekly  breakfast  party, 
and  many  a  symposium  about  things  human  and  divine, 
by  day  and  by  night.  . 

One  of  the  things  most  talked  about,  but  of  very\ 
small  consequence,  was  the  scheme  of  mending  a  . 
neglected  bit  of  road  near  Hinksey,  out  of  Oxford. 
He  had  always  preached  the  value  of  some  experience 
of  useful  manual  labour  as  part  of  sound  education — 
the  old  monkish  gospel  of  laborare  est  orare,  the  old 
Eoman  story  of  Cincinnatus  at  the  plough,  the  old 
Greek  honour  of  agriculture,  and  much  also  set  forth 
in  the  Professor's  Aratra  Pentelici.  So  he  called  forth 
his  young  pupils  to  leave  their  bats  and  their  oars  for 
a  space  in  order  to  take  a  turn  as  "soldiers  of  the 
ploughshare  "  in  mending  a  farmer's  road  that  nobody 
cared  to  touch.  The  Professor  bought  a  stock  of  picks 
and  shovels,  sent  for  his  gardener  to  show  them  how  to 
dig,  and  gallantly  set  forth  to  do  a  little  roadmaking 
in  person.  It  was  found  to  be  rather  Quixotic,  and 
there  was  a  good  deal  of  jesting,  for  the  road  was 
rather  a  failure  from  the  engineer's  point  of  view. 

There  was  more  in  the  incident  than  was  seen  at 
first  sight.  It  showed  a  few  young  men  how  inferior 
to  an  average  navvy  they  were  in  an  honest  day's 
labour;  and  it  might  have  taught  the  Professor  him- 
self, had  his  ears  been  open  to  teaching,  that  the  arts 
and  sciences  cannot  be  improvised  de  twvo  by  an 
amateur,  however  burning  be  his  enthusiasm  and 
however  righteous  his  purpose.     But  the  spirit  of  they 


142  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

Hinksey  roadmaking  sank  deep  into  certain  minds 
willing  to  hear.  "I  tell  you,"  Ruskin  once  said  at 
Oxford,  "that  neither  sound  art,  policy,  nor  religion, 
can  exist  in  England,  until,  neglecting,  if  it  must  be, 
your  own  pleasure  gardens  and  pleasure  chambers,  you 
resolve  that  the  streets  which  are  the  habitation  of  the 
poor,  and  the  fields  which  are  the  playgrounds  of  their 
children,  shall  be  restored  to  the  rule  of  the  spirits, 
whosoever  they  are,  in  earth  and  heaven,  that  ordain 
and  reward,  with  constant  and  conscious  felicity,  all 
that  is  decent  and  orderly,  beautiful  and  pure." 
Mr.  E.  T.  Cook,  who  was  himself  one  of  these  students, 
tells  us  how  the  conviction  of  this  truth  led  shortly 
afterwards  to  Toynbee's  work  in  the  East  End,  and  to 
the  various  University  "  settlements "  which  grew  out 
of  it.  All  this  was  no  doubt  quite  outside  anything 
prescribed  in  the  endowment  of  the  Fine  Art  Professor- 
ship. But  it  was  a  work  which  very  few  academic 
professors  have  ever  attempted — or  could  possibly 
have  achieved. 

The  third  term  of  the  Professorship  was  much 
broken  by  his  ill-health  and  acute  sorrow  and  dis- 
turbance of  mind,  and  after  nine  years  of  service  he 
resigned  his  work  at  Oxford.  Three  years  later  his 
health  seemed  improved,  and  he  began  lectures  again  in 
March  1883  %vith  the  Art  of  England,  and  in  the  fol- 
lowing year  he  gave  the  lectures  called  the  Pleasures 
of  England ;  but  the  continued  strain  on  his  mind  and 
the  growing  irritability  of  his  nervous  system  much 
disturbed  the  spoken  course  of  this  year.  He  had 
always  regarded  it  as  his  mission  to  decry  and  oppose 
modern  science,  at  least  the  modern  form  of  teaching 
science,  and  that  on  grounds  of  morals,  of  art,  and  of 


XI.]         AT  OXFORD— WOKK  AND  INFLUENCE         143 

religion  combined.  It  was  with  him  partly  the  opposi- 
tion felt  by  all  synthetic  philosophers  to  the  pedantic 
specialism  in  fashion  ;  partly  it  was  a  religious  horror 
of  the  evolutionary  and  materialist  ideas,  as  he  under- 
stood them,  in  the  science  of  Darwin  and  Herbert 
Spencer,  Professor  Huxley,  and  Dr.  Haeckel ;  but 
mainly  it  was  the  cast  of  mind  which  made  St.  Bernard 
denounce  Abailard  and  the  Inquisition  persecute 
Giordano  Bruno  and  Galileo.  The  proposal  to  estab- 
lish a  physiological  laboratory  in  the  Oxford  ^luseum, 
within  which  he  anticipated  the  practice  of  vivisection, 
drove  Ruskin  wild  mth  indignation;  and,  upon  the 
vote  for  the  laboratory  being  passed  (December  1884), 
he  summarily  resigned,  and  he  quitted  Oxford  for 
ever. 

The  six  lectures  of  1883  collected  as  the  Art  of 
England  are,  in  many  ways,  the  most  strictly  critical 
of  art  and  artists,  and  the  least  encumbered  ^vith 
social  moralising  of  any  that  he  delivered.  They 
are  practically  a  continuation  of  his  Modern  Painters. 
They  are  marked  with  the  same  passionate  admiration 
and  much  of  the  same  scathing  criticism.  The  name 
of  Gabriel  Rossetti,  he  says,  should  be  placed  first  on 
the  list  of  men  who  have  raised  and  changed  the  spirit 
of  modem  Art.  He  was  the  chief  intellectual  force  in 
the  establishment  of  the  modern  romantic  school  in 
England.  Rossetti  is  Tennyson's  "greatest  disciple." 
But  then  Holman  Hunt,  in  his  religious  pictures,  is 
even  greater  in  sincerity  and  respect  for  physical  and 
material  truth.  His  picture  of  the  "  Flight  into  Egypt " 
bids  fair  to  be  the  greatest  religious  painting  of  our 
time.  The  Professor  then  introduces  to  his  hearers 
drawings  by  two  American  ladies  and  by  two  Italian 


144  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

young  men — more  helpful  and  exemplary  than  any  he 
had  yet  been  able  to  find.  This  lyrical  praise,  at  least 
of  the  two  Italians,  has  hardly  been  accepted  by  the 
world.  And  the  lecture  closed  as  usual  with  a  devo- 
tional invocation  only  differing  from  the  best  type  of 
sermon  heard  from  the  pulpit,  in  the  perfect  simplicity 
of  the  thought  and  the  exquisite  music  of  the  words. 

Bume-Jones  and  G.  F.  Watts  were  the  subject  of  the 
second  lecture.  The  primary  virtue  of  the  Pre- 
Raphaelite  school  was  the  effort  to  conceive  things  as 
they  are,  "thinking  and  feeling  them  quite  out" — a 
noble  example  of  which  is  Millais'  "Caller  Herrin'." 
Burne-Jones  has  command  over  the  entire  ran^e  of 
Northern  and  Greek  mythology  above  all  contem- 
porary designers  in  Europe.  With  characteristic 
subtlety  and  refinement  the  Professor  touches  all  the 
elements  and  conditions  of  imaginative  art.  Burne- 
Jones,  he  says,  is  a  chiaroscurist,  whilst  Rossetti 
conceives  in  colour  only — the  former  preferring 
"subjects  that  appeal  to  the  intellect  and  the  heart 
through  intricacies  of  delicate  line,  or  the  dimness 
and  coruscation  of  ominous  light."  Of  Mr.  Watts  the 
Professor  has  not  much  to  say,  except  that  he  seems  to 
have  been  hampered  by  attempting  to  make  his  work 
on  all  sides  perfect.  But  his  constant  reference  to  the 
highest  examples  of  Great  Art  in  form  and  his  sensitive- 
ness to  tenderness  and  breadth  have  ranked  Watts 
among  the  painters  of  the  great  Athenian  days,  of  whom 
Plato  wrote  in  the  sixth  book  of  the  Laws.  As  none  of 
these  works  of  the  painters  of  Athens  have  come  down 
to  us  in  any  form,  the  comparison  is  somewhat  difficult 
to  follow.  The  point  seems  to  be  that  Mr.  Watts  is 
always  trying  to  make  things  "  more  beautiful  and  more 


XL]        AT  OXFORD— WORK  AND  INFLUENCE         145 

apparent,"  and  indeed  that  is  the  aim  of  most  serious 
and  conscientious  artists. 

The  third  lecture  is  in  some  ways  one  of  the  most 
typically  characteristic  that  Ruskin  ever  wrote,  and  it 
is  therefore  worth  analysing  carefully.  Its  title  is 
"Classic  Schools  of  Painting — Sir  F.  Leighion  and  Alma 
Tadema."  It  consists  of  some  forty  pages  of  quarto 
print.  Of  these,  two  are  devoted  to  Sir  F.  Leigh  ton, 
and  about  as  many  to  Alma  Tadema.  About  thirty- 
five  pages  are  occupied  with  various  things  having  no 
reference  to  these  painters  at  all.  He  opens  vrith.  a  line 
of  Horace,  praises  W.  Richmond's  portraits  which 
"lead  and  crown  the  general  splendour  of  the  Gros- 
venor  Gallery."  By  "classic"  art  he  means  anti- 
Gothic,  and  he  takes  Leighton  and  A.  Tadema  as  good 
representatives  of  the  "classic"  spirit.  The  Greeks 
perfected  the  representation  of  the  human  body;  the 
Northern  nations  very  slowly  and  imperfectly  attained 
to  this  skill.  He  produces  facsimiles  of  illuminated  MSS. 
letters  from  Monte  Cassino,  and  compares  them  with 
copies  of  frescoes  at  Pompeii.  The  latter  are  obviously 
the  work  of  a  nation  in  the  jaws  of  death.  Greek  art 
is  to  be  studied  only  from  Homeric  days  down  to 
Marathon.  This  excludes  Pheidias  and  the  Parthenon 
— Gt)thic  art  is  to  be  studied  from  Alfred  to  the  Black 
Prince,  in  England ;  in  France,  from  Clovis  to  St.  Louis. 
The  combination  of  Greek  and  Gothic  is  to  be  found  in 
absolute  balance  in  Nicholas  of  Pisa,  and  thencefor- 
ward up  to  Perugino  and  Sandro  Botticelli.  A  period 
of  decadence  follows  among  all  the  nations  of  Europe. 
(But  what  about  Raphael,  Titian,  Tintoretto,  Leonardo  1) 
But  then  out  of  these  ashes  and  embers  the  flame  leaps 
again  in  Rubens  and  Vandyke,  and  thence  to  the  top- 

K 


146  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

most  representatives  of  English  art  with  Sir  Joshua 
and  Gainsborough.  Thereon  follows  much  about  these 
two  greatest  and  most  English  of  our  painters.  How 
would  their  sitters  look  painted  in  the  classic  manner, 
with  very  scanty  costumes  1  "  The  charm  of  all  these 
pictures  is  in  a  great  degree  dependent  on  toilette." 
Luca  della  Robbia  united  the  Gothic  Avith  the  Classic 
School.  A  little  girl  of  three  went  up  to  an  Infant 
Christ  of  Luca's  work  in  the  Professor's  room  and 
kissed  it  lovingly.  Sandro  Botticelli's  frescoes  in  the 
Louvre  are  also  similar  types  in  painting.  At  Venice  too 
the  professor  was  able  to  copy  the  St.  Ursula  pictures 
in  the  Academy.  Portraiture  was  the  destruction  of 
Greek  design,  and  good  Gothic  painting  must  excel  in 
portraits.  Holbein's  George  Guysen  at  Berlin  is  a 
perfect  portrait,  and  so  is  the  portrait  in  the  Tribune  of 
Florence,  once  believed  to  be  by  Raphael,  but  really 
by  a  much  more  laborious  master.  The  portraits  by 
Mr.  Stacy  Marks  are  also  most  valuable,  and  so  were 
his  "Three  Jolly  Postboys"  and  his  "Jack  Cade." 

Twenty  pages  before  we  get  a  word  about  Leighton ! 
Even  he  has  something  of  the  Goth  about  him,  for  he 
paints  little  girls  with  a  soft  charm  peculiarly  his  own, 
and  the  Classics  never  gave  us  little  girls.  The 
Professor  feels  that  ha  had  no  right  to  speak  of 
Leigh  ton's  higher  efiforts,  "  which  have  been  the  result 
of  his  acutely  observant  and  enthusiastic  study  of  the 
organism  of  the  human  body,"  with  which  Ruskin  has 
no  sympathy.  Leighton,  of  all  our  present  masters, 
delights  most  in  softly -blended  colours,  and  "  his  ideal 
of  beauty  is  more  nearly  that  of  Correggio  than  any 
seen  since  Correggio's  time,"  mth  his  gift  of  beautiful 
vaghezza.     And  ^vith    this    diplomatic   compliment  to 


XI.]         AT  OXFORD— WORK  AND  INFLUENCE         147 

the  late  President  of  the  Eoyal  Academy  and  some- 
what ambiguous  praise  of  his  "  Coireggiosity "  and 
"Vaghezza,"  Sir  Frederick  passes  out  of  the  lecture 
altogether. 

As  to  Alma  Tadema,  admitting  his  wonderful  techni- 
cal accuracy  and  minute  draughtsmanship,  the  Professor 
warns  his  pupils  against  his  love  of  cool  twilight  instead 
of  strong  sunlight.  One  thinks  this  remark  must  be 
inverted  by  the  reporter.  Learn  by  heart,  he  says,  the 
seven  lines  of  the  Iliad  when  Achilles  shows  himself  on 
the  rampart  and  Athene  wrapped  him  in  a  cloud  of  fire. 
The  Greeks  associated  light  and  cloud  in  their  terrible 
mystery,  as  the  University  motto  is  Dominus  illumincUio. 
Now,  says  the  Professor,  Alma  Tadema's  pictures  of 
Roman  life  are  always  in  twilight  (?)  This  is  strange 
news!  The  picture  called  the  "Pyrrhic  Dance"  was 
like  a  detachment  of  black  beetles  in  search  of  a  dead 
rat.  Where  is  the  Pyrrhic  phalanx  gone  1  "  This  is 
the  classic  life  which  your  nineteenth  century  fancy 
sets  forth  under  its  fuliginous  and  cantharoid  disfigure- 
ment and  disgrace."  So  much  for  Mr.  Alma  Tadema 
as  an  exponent  of  the  classic  art !  The  pretence  of 
classic  study  is  only  the  "continuing  poison  of  the 
Kenaissance." 

Alma  Tadema,  like  Leighton,  dismissed,  the  Professor 
turns  to  other  things.  A  thing  of  beauty  is  a  law  for 
ever,  whether  it  be  sijoy  is  another  thing.  The  beauty 
of  Greece  depended  on  the  laws  of  Lycurgus;  the 
beauty  of  Rome  on  those  of  Numa ;.  our  own  on  the 
laws  of  Christ.  Listen  to  the  story  of  a  Tuscan  girl, 
Beatrice,  daughter  of  a  stonemason  at  Melo,  who,  being 
a  beauty,  and  a  fine  singer,  was  married  by  a  rich 
farmer,  when  she  showed  great  vocal  powers.     Miss 


148  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

Alexander's  book  of  Tuscan  roadside  songs  has  great 
value.     The   Ford   of   the    Ox   here   in   Oxford   is   a 
baptism  as  well  as  a  ford ;  and  the  waves  of  it,  as  the 
sands,  are  holy.     Your  task  is  to  cross  it,  staff  in  hand. 
On  the  other  side  is  the  Promised  Land,  the  Land  of 
the  Leal — when  you  get  your  Testamur  in  the  Schools. 
This  cavalier  bowing  out  from  the  court  of  Art,  of 
painters  like  Leighton  and  Alma  Tadema,  men  whose 
immense  industry  and  learning,  consummate  drawing 
and  grace  in  composition,  are  familiar  to  all  Europe, 
strikes  us  the  more  painfully  in  that  it  is  followed  by 
such  enthusiastic  praise  given  to  Mrs.  Allingham  and 
Kate  Greenaway,  Leech,  Du  Maurier,   and  Tenniel, 
Robson  and  Copley  Fielding.     No  one  grudges  words 
of  hearty  sympathy  for  all  the  delightful  things  these 
artists  have  given  the  world ;  and  Euskin  in  his  passion 
for  enfantillage  truly  anticipated  the  judgment  of  the 
civilised  world  on  Miss  Greenaway's  lovely  children. 
But  to  go  into  raptures  over  the  vignettes  of  toybooks 
and  che  woodcuts  of  Punchy  whilst  casting  into  limbo 
^vith  suspicious   compliments  men   like  Leighton  and 
Alma   Tadema   as    personifying   the    "poison   of    the 
Renaissance,"  and   the   "fuliginous  disfigurement"  of 
the  nineteenth  century,  is  indeed  a  melancholy  example 
of  fanaticism  in  its  dotage.     Leighton  is  ignored  on  the 
ground   of   his   study  of    "classical"  form — the  very 
thing  for  which  Watts  had  just  been  praised.     And  so 
Alma  Tadema  is  an  example  of  the  "fuliginous  dis- 
fic^urement"  due  to  the  Renaissance,  because  he  loves 
twilight,   the  very  thing  for  which  Burne-Jones  had 
been  praised  for  his  loving  "  the  dimness  and  corusca- 
tion of  ominous  light " — whatever  that  means.     Ruskin 
has  taste  too  fine  and  sincerity  too  real  not  to  acknow- 


XI.]         AT  OXFORD— WORK  AND  INFLUENCE         149 

ledge  the  splendid  gifts  of  these  two  "classical" 
masters,  though  in  somewhat  ungracious  words ;  but 
he  chooses  to  pick  them  out  for  condemnation  as  both 
being  men  manifestly  untouched  by  his  own  religious 
sentiment.  In  this  he  reminds  us  of  a  rabid  monk  at 
Naples  or  Seville  denouncing  "The  Eevolution."  It  is 
an  offence,  not  so  much  against  reason  and  taste  as 
against  morality  and  fairness,  which  no  skill  in  judg- 
ment or  beauty  of  language  can  excuse,  and  which  even 
the  approach  of  cerebral  disease  can  hardly  palliate. 
There  is  not  a  shadow  of  anything  evil  in  any  work  of 
Leighton  or  of  Tadema,  even  if  it  were  true  that  their 
methods  are  limited  or  imperfect.  To  charge  them  as 
vendors  of  "poison"  and  "disgrace,"  because  their 
ideas  of  beauty  were  formed  on  antique,  and  not  on 
mediaeval  and  biblical  memories,  is  an  ethical  rather 
than  an  aesthetic  aberration  of  mind. 

It  was  violent  injustice  of  this  kind,  -vvith  incessant 
self-contradiction  and  incoherence,  deepening  all  through 
the  perturbed  period  of  Euskin's  life  (1871-1886),  which 
alienated  men  of  sober  and  solid  thought.  "A  voice 
crying  in  the  wilderness  "  was  a  part  legitimate  enough 
for  one  who  chose  to  face  all  its  pain,  as  did  Coleridge 
and  Shelley,  Carlyle  and  Tolstoi.  But  a  University 
Professor  of  Fine  Art  had  duties  of  a  specific  kind,  and 
had  accepted  a  task  in  an  organised  body  of  teachers. 
To  make  pictures  and  painters  mere  texts  for  a  religious 
and  metaphysical  propaganda  exclusively  his  own,  to 
denounce  and  ridicule  his  colleagues  conducting  their 
special  studies,  and  to  make  his  chair  a  pulpit  for  a 
Neo-Christianity  or  Palaeo-Catholicism  of  his  own  inven- 
tion, was  unfair  to  the  founders  and  managers  of  the 
trust  whose  name  he  accepted.     And  all  the  more,  as 


150  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap.  xr. 

it  was  done  by  a  man  who  stood  outside  all  known 
communions,  who  had  no  fellow-believers,  and  refused 
any  dogma,  formula,  or  communion  whatever. 

It  could  have  but  one  end.  And  that  end  was  v 
infinitely  sad.  "What  am  I,"  he  said  in  1875  {Fors, 
Letter  LVlll.),  "  to  claim  leadership,  infirm  and  old  ? 
But  I  have  found  no  other  man  in  England,  none  in 
Europe,  ready  to  receive  it.  Such  as  I  am,  to  my  own 
amazement,  I  stand — so  far  as  I  can  discern — alone  in 
conviction,  in  hope,  and  in  resolution,  in  the  wilderness 
of  this  modern  world.  Bred  in  luxury,  which  I  perceive 
to  have  been  unjust  to  others,  and  destructive  to 
myself ;  vacillating,  foolish,  and  miserably  failing  in  all 
my  own  conduct  in  life — and  blown  about  hopelessly 
by  storms  of  passion — I,  a  man  clothed  in  soft  raiment; 
I,  a  reed  shaken  with  the  wind,  have  yet  this  message 
to  all  men  again  intrusted  to  me.  Behold,  the  axe  is 
laid  to  the  root  of  the  trees.  Whatsoever  tree  bringeth 
not  forth  good  fruit,  shall  be  hewn  dowTi  and  cast  into) 
the  fire." 

W^ere  words  so  poignant,  so  truthful  in  their  self- 
reproach  and  self-abasement,  ever  uttered  by  a  man  of 
brilliant  powers,  whose  whole  life  had  been  devoted  to 
generous  causes  and  noble  ideas  ?  Yes ;  such  words 
may  not  have  been  uttered,  but  such  despair  has  been 
felt  by  preachers,  reformers,  and  prophets  of  old  time 
and  of  all  time — by  Job,  David,  and  Isaiah ;  by  John 
the  Baptist,  St.  Francis,  Savonarola,  George  Fox;  by 
Tolstoi  and  Mazzini.  Lama  Sabachthani  is  often  the 
last  cry  of  men  whose  life  seems  to  end  in  ignominious 
failure,  but  whose  very  groans  have  a  vital  force  long 
after  they  are  gone. 


CHAPTER   XII 

ILLNESS — DISAPPOINTMENT — RETIREMENT 

To  understand  the  nature  and  development  of  Ruskin's 
mind,  it  is  essential  to  take  note  of  the  constant  attacks 
of  illness  from  which  he  suffered,  and  the  degree  to 
which  these  attacks  reacted  on  his  later  literary  work. 
And  the  story  of  his  Oxford  lecturing  bears  cruel 
evidence  of  the  reaction  of  his  physical  weakness  on 
his  mental  equilibrium.  He  was  constituted  from  birth 
with  a  nervous  organisation  of  abnormal  delicacy,  and 
at  the  same  time  of  singular  elasticity.  It  was  a 
combination  of  ancestral  vitality  with  intense  sensitive- 
ness to  external  shock  as  well  as  to  mental  impressions. 
Hence  it  came  about  that  a  man  who  (but  for  a  few 
days)  reached  the  age  of  eighty-one,  who  had  been  an 
indefatigable  traveller  for  more  than  sixty  years,  and 
had  wTitten  more  books  than  any  one  of  his  time,  was 
prostrated  with  alarming  illness  every  few  years  of  his 
life,  and  for  years  together  was  incapable  of  continuous 
work. 

His  own  memoirs  and  those  of  his  intimates  record 
these  incessant  attacks  of  illness.  When  he  was  eight 
or  nine,  at  Dunkeld,  the  child's  life  was  in  danger  from 
a  sudden  chill  whilst  gathering  foxgloves  by  the  river- 
side. He  seems  to  have  had  another  illness  at  the  age 
of  ten,  which  kept  the  family  anxiously  at  home.     At 

151 


152  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

the  age  of  sixteen  lie  had  a  sharp  attack  of  pleurisy, 
and  was  in  danger  for  three  or  four  days,  his  life  being 
saved  by  his  mother  and  one  of  the  physicians  who 
prevented  the  murderous  resort  to  bleeding  which  the 
others  wanted  to  practise  on  him.  The  early  disap- 
pointment in  love  for  Adele  Domecq  brought  on  a  state 
of  depression  which  ended  in  the  alarming  haemorrhage 
from  the  lungs  at  Oxford  at  the  age  of  twenty-one. 
His  University  career  was  suddenly  broken;  we  are 
told  that  "for  nearly  two  years  he  was  dragged  about 
from  place  to  place,  and  from  doctor  to  doctor,  in 
search  of  health."  When  abroad  he  had  a  series  of 
fevers  in  Italy  and  in  the  Alps.  Immediately  on  his 
marriage  (10th  April  1848)  he  was  seized  with  another 
attack  on  the  lungs ;  and  having  a  relapse,  he  remained 
an  invalid  until  August.  The  folloMdng  year,  in 
Switzerland,  he  was  attacked  with  a  quinsy,  w^hich 
caused  his  parents  acute  anxiety.  AVhen,  at  the  age  of 
forty,  he  broke  off  his  art  studies  to  devote  himseK  to 
social  problems,  a  melancholy  brooding  over  the  evils 
of  the  times  took  possession  of  him  and  never  left  him 
again. 

Henceforth  he  lived  much  alone,  or  in  silent  medi- 
tation, for  a  period  of  many  years.  In  1862  he  wrote 
from  Switzerland  :  "The  loneliness  is  very  great."  "I 
am  still  very  unwell,  and  tormented  between  the  longing 
for  rest  and  lovely  life  and  the  sense  of  this  terrific  call 
of  human  crime  for  resistance  and  of  human  misery  for 
help."  "  It  seems  to  me  as  the  voice  of  a  river  of  blood 
which  can  but  sweep  me  down  in  the  midst  of  its 
black  clots,  helpless."  Then  came  the  death  of  his 
father,  some  years  later  that  of  his  mother,  and  the 
break  up  of  his  old  home.     The  years  1870  and  1871, 


XII.]  ILLNESS— DISAPPOINTMENT— RETIREMENT  153 

during  the  great  European  war,  were  full  of  intense 
pain  to  him  on  public  grounds ;  and  in  the  summer  of 
1871  he  had  that  acute  internal  inflammation  which 
nearly  cost  him  his  life,  and  gave  his  friends  so  violent 
a  scare,  as  Carlyle  records  in  a  characteristic  letter  : 
"We  were  in  a  state  really  deserving  pity  on  your 
account,  till  the  very  newspapers  took  compassion  on 
us  and  announced  the  immediate  danger  to  be  past." 

It  is  a  painful  story  to  rehearse ;  but  it  is  impossible 
to  form  any  honest  conception  of  Ruskin's  work  without 
some  knowledge  of  the  physical  and  moral  afflictions 
that  he  bore  for  the  last  thirty  years  of  his  life.  And 
the  facts  have  been  made  public  by  his  most  devoted 
admirers  and  most  intimate  friends,  such  as  Mr.  E.  T. 
Cook,  Mr.  Spielmann,  Mr.  Collingwood,  and  others, 
and  they  are  tenderly  and  truly  described  by  M.  de  la 
Sizeranne  and  by  M.  Jacques  Bardoux  in  French.  No 
one  can  be  a  more  faithful  and  loving  witness  than 
Mr.  E.  T.  Cook,  the  authorised  editor  of  Euskin's 
collected  TForks,  and  the  writer  of  the  excellent  memoir 
in  the  Dictionary  of  National  Biography.  He  tells  us  of 
the  intense  strain  of  mind  and  of  successive  disappoints 
ments  which  undermined  Ruskin's  health  from  the  time 
of  the  Oxford  professorship  of  1870.  He  was  continu- 
ally writing  letters  to  the  press  on  public  incidents  and 
engaging  in  acute  controversies  and  denunciations  on 
all  sorts  of  subjects  and  ^\^[th  every  class  of  person. 
Mr.  Cook  says :  "He  was  like  the  li\dng  conscience  of 
the  modern  world,  and  felt  acutely  the  wrongs  and 
^vrongdoings  of  others.  In  no  age  could  his  sensitive 
heart  have  escaped  these  sorrows.  '  Le  pauvre  enfant, 
il  ne  sait  pas  vivre,'  was  the  verdict  of  his  Swiss  guide 
upon  him.     In  an  earlier  age  he  might  have  become  a 


154  JOHN  RtJSKIN  [chap, 

saint.  In  his  own  age  he  spent  himself,  his  time,  and 
his  wealth  in  trying  to  illuminate  and  ennoble  the  lives 
of  others.  ...  'It  is  not  my  work  that  drives  me 
mad,'  he  once  said,  '  but  the  sense  that  nothing  comes 
of  it.'"  A  spirit  of  intense  sensitiveness  tormented 
by  sympathies  and  regrets  so  acute,  in  a  body  torn  by 
constant  diseases,  utterly  lonely  and  disdainful  of  help 
from  any  one  on  equal  terms,  was  marked  out  by 
destiny  for  a  cruel  overthrow  of  mental  self-control. 

And  to  this  mental  strain  was  added  a  private  sorrow. 
As  an  old  man  of  some  seventy  years  he  gave  the  world 
(in  Frceferifa,  iii.  51)  something  of  the  story.  In  1858 
(he  was  then  nearly  forty,  and  no  longer  a  married 
man)  a  lady  wrote  to  him  to  beg  him  to  come  and  see 
her,  and  to  teach  her  two  daughters  and  a  son  how  to 
begin  to  draw.  He  went.  "Eosie,"  the  youngest,  a 
child  of  nine,  came  out  of  the  nursery,  stared  at  him 
and  thought  him  very  ugly,  and  "gave  him  her  hand 
as  a  good  dog  gives  its  paw."  She  was  a  blue-eyed 
fair  girl,  with  lovely  lips  and  pretty  hair,  bright,  saucy, 
and  clever.  She  called  her  governess  "  Bun,"  and  the 
drawing-teacher  became  "Crumpet,"  afterwards  "Saint 
Crumpet,  or  "St.  C,"  otherwise,  when  they  studied 
geology  and  extinct  beasts,  "Archegosaurus."  The 
next  year  the  family  went  to  live  in  Florence,  whence 
Eosie  wrote  letters  to  "Dearest  St  Crumpet,"  and 
signed  "  ever  your  rose,"  as  is  set  forth  in  Prceterita — 
clearly  a  very  clever  missie  of  ten. 

Years  and  years  passed.  John  Euskin  was  perpetually 
occupied  with  romantic  friendships  with  young  girls 
and  children,  as  he  freely  tells  us  with  charming 
naivete  in  many  writings ;  but  when  and  how  he  again 
saw  much  of  the  child  "  Eosie,"  he  has  not  told  us,  except 


xii.]  ILLNESS— DISAPPOINTMENT— RETIREMENT  155 

that  some  ten  years  later  (when  he  was  just  fifty)  he 
had  "  Paradisaical  walks  "  with  her  in  his  Surrey  home, 
which  she  used  to  call  "Eden-land"  {Prceter.  iii.  85). 
We  are  told  by  Mr.  Cook  that  the  lady  was  Rose  La 
Touche,  an  Irish  girl,  and  that  he  at  last  asked  her 
to  marry  him.  She  hesitated,  though  deeply  attached 
to  him,  for  she  was  of  a  severely  evangelical  school. 
"A  little  work  of  prose  and  verse  published  by  her 
in  1870  is  expressive  of  a  deeply  religious,  but  some- 
what morbid  temperament."  She  was  shocked  by  the 
latitudinarian  tone  of  Fors.  ' '  She  could  not  be  unequally 
yoked  mth  an  unbeliever.  To  her  the  alternative  was 
plain ;  the  choice  was  terrible ;  yet,  having  once  seen 
her  path,  she  turned  resolutely  away"  (Collingwood, 
p.  299). 

It  was  in  1872  that  she  definitely  refused  to  be  his 
wife.  She  was  twenty-four ;  he  was  fifty-three.  They 
parted  for  ever.  She  fell  into  ill-health,  and  was 
evidently  at  the  point  of  death  when,  three  years 
later,  he  begged  that  he  might  see  her  once  more. 
She  sent  as  reply  the  question  whether  he  could  say 
that  he  loved  God  better  than  he  loved  her.  He  could 
not  say  he  did.  She  refused  to  see  him  again,  and 
died  so.  In  presence  of  a  tragedy  so  real,  full  of 
excruciating  pain  to  two  souls  deeply  sincere,  yet  with 
circumstances  so  morbid  around  it,  as  to  which  those 
who  know  all  and  those  who  do  not  know  all  will 
form  different  judgments,  it  seems  best  to  keep  silence 
even  from  good  words.  A  French  writer  has  said : 
"II  faut  s'incliner  bien  bas  devant  ces  deux  ames, 
assez  fortes  pour  sacrifier.  Tune  sa  vie,  I'autre  son  bon- 
heur,  a  la  sincerite  absolue.  Le  grand  Corneille  les 
aurait  trouvees  dignes  de  ses  heros  "  (Bardoux,  p.  139). 


156  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

Whatever  we  think  of  his  delicacy,  of  his  prudence, 
or  of  his  good  sense,  there  can  be  no  doubt  about  the 
bitter  despair  in  which  this  clouded  Ruskin's  later  life. 
He  plunged  into  work;  he  curbed  his  tendency  to 
doubt,  or  at  least  to  publish  his  doubts.  "The  death 
of  Eosie,"  we  are  told,  "was  the  greatest  grief  of 
Ruskin's  life.  He  suffered  much  from  sleeplessness, 
and  had  unnaturally  vivid  dreams."  He  now  fell 
in  with  spiritualists,  and  attended  stances,  where 
"mediums"  revealed  to  him  the  spirit  of  his  dead 
lady.  Years  before  he  had  been  profoundly  impressed 
by  Carpaccio's  picture  of  St.  Ursula  in  the  Academy 
at  Venice.  He  spent  his  days  in  copying  it,  then  in 
studying  the  life  of  St.  Ursula.  "  He  fell  in  love  with 
St.  Ursula  " ;  she  became  a  spiritual  type  of  all  womanly 
virtue  and  grace.  He  lectured,  he  dreamed,  he  ^^Tote 
about  St.  Ursula,  who  at  last  became  mentally  ab- 
sorbed in  the  memory  of  his  dead  mistress.  And 
St.  Ursula,  w^ho  fills  so  many  pages  of  Fors,  became  I 
to  Ruskin  much  what  Beatrice  was  to  Dante.  I 

A  brain  of  such  imaginative  power,  bound  to  a  heart 
so  morbidly  sensitive,  furiously  seeking  peace  through 
indefatigable  work,  with  the  ever  present  shadow  of 
blighted  affection  Avithin  and  passionate  abhorrence  of 
the  social  misery  around — here  was  a  nature  perilously 
near  to  a  crushing  collapse.  All  through  the  summer  and 
autumn  of  1873  he  suffered  from  insomnia,  unnatural 
dreams,  feverish  work,  utter  prostration  of  body  and 
mind.  In  1874  he  tried  another  journey  to  Italy, 
where  he  had  a  dangerous  fever  at  Assisi,  and  dreamed 
that  he  was  made  a  brother  of  the  third  order  of 
St.  Francis.  It  was  from  Assisi  that  he  indignantly 
refused   the   gold   medal   of    the   Royal   Institute    of 


XII.]  ILLNESS— DISAPPOINTMENT— RETIREMENT  157 

British  Architects.  Quaint  fellowship — St.  Francis, 
John  Ruskin,  Sir  Gilbert  Scott,  and  the  "restorers" 
of  ancient  churches  !  His  mental  condition  grew  more 
feverish  each  year.  He  resolved  to  recast  his  books, 
and  to  recant  many  of  his  opinions.  It  is  a  cruel 
record — "a  state  of  hopeless  confusion  of  letters, 
drawings,  and  work."  He  says,  "  I  can't  fix  my  mind 
on  a  sum  in  addition ;  it  goes  off,  between  seven  and 
nine,  into  a  speculation  on  the  seven  deadly  sins  or 
the  nine  Muses."  On  Christmas  Day,  1876,  he  had 
an  attack  of  severe  pain,  followed  by  a  sort  of  vision 
of  the  dead  lady  as  St.  Ursula,  and  he  felt  that  he 
had  recovered  his  lost  conviction  of  immortality  in 
a  future  world.  Early  in  1878  he  was  struck  down 
by  his  first  attack  of  brain  fever,  producing  acute 
delirium,  which  lasted  at  least  two  months,  but  from 
which  he  seemed  completely  recovered  before  the 
autumn  passed. 

It  was  but  a  seeming  recovery.  He  never  quite 
shook  off  the  terrible  collapse  of  1878,  which  the 
strain  of  work,  disappointment,  and  reveries  would 
from  time  to  time  partially  renew.  The  pressure  of 
real  work,  dreams  of  vast  work  still  to  do,  continually 
excited  that  super-heated  brain.  At  fifty-six  he  wrote 
about  the  "various  designs  of  which  he  had  been 
merely  collecting  material."  These  were — a  history  of 
fifteenth  century  Florentine  art  in  six  octavo  volumes ; 
an  analysis  of  the  Attic  art  of  the  fifth  century  B.C., 
in  three  volumes;  an  exhaustive  history  of  northern 
thirteenth  century  art,  in  ten  volumes ;  a  life  of  Sir 
Walter  Scott,  with  an  analysis  of  modern  epic  art,  in 
seven  volumes ;  a  life  of  Xenophon,  with  analysis  of 
the  general  principles   of  education,  in  ten  volumes ; 


158  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

a  commentary  on  Hesiod,  with  final  analysis  of  the 
principles  of  Political  Economy,  in  nine  volumes ;  and 
a  general  description  of  the  geology  and  botany  of  the 
Alps,  in  twenty-four  volumes.  Here  are  sixty-nine 
volumes,  to  be  -written  by  a  man  shattered  in  body  and 
mind  at  the  end  of  a  laborious  life.  They  say  Empire- 
builders  must  "think  in  continents";  the  distracted 
Herod  loved  to  "think  in  gold  and  dream  in  silver." 
But  John  Euskin  would  think  in  Encyclopaedias,  com- 
prising Man  and  Nature  in  one  library.  The  cata- 
logue of  volumes  may  have  been  his  playful  trick  of 
exaggeration.  He  was  ever  a  megalomaniac,  and  never 
more  so  than  when  dreaming  of  what  he  was  destined 
himself  to  achieve.  But  this  mere  sketch  of  works  to 
come  which  he  seriously  made  public  is  highly  char- 
acteristic of  the  state  of  his  mind ;  and  all  the  lectures 
of  his  professorial  time,  Deucalion^  Proserpina^  and  the 
rest,  seem  but  stray  jottings  from  his  notebooks 
collected  as  materials  for  this  vast  encyclopaedic 
scheme. 

Early  in  1879  he  was  forced  by  the  state  of  his 
brain  to  resign  his  Oxford  Professorship ;  and  by  way 
of  a  rest  he  plunged  into  the  study  of  glaciers  in  the 
Alps,  and  into  vehement  controversy  -svith  Professor 
Tyndall,  which  was  like  the  fabled  combat  between 
an  eagle  and  a  whale.  At  sixty,  then,  Ruskin  retired 
to  peace  and  study  at  Brantwood,  his  lovely  home  on 
Coniston  Lake.  It  is  one  of  the  most  exquisite  spots 
in  the  Lake  country.  His  old-fashioned  cottage,  a  mile 
or  so  from  the  village  of  Coniston,  stood  on  the  spur 
of  headlands  at  the  north-eastern  end  of  the  lake,  across 
which  it  looked  on  to  the  crags  of  the  Coniston  Old 
Man  with  its  firs,  larches,  quarries,  and  fells.     There 


XII.]  ILLNESS— DISAPPOINTMENT— RETIREMENT  169 

he  gradually  formed  a  garden  of  roses,  flowers,  and 
shrubs,  in  rough  natural  terraces,  leading  down  to  the 
tiny  harbour  which  held  the  boats  for  the  lake.  By 
degrees  the  house  was  enlarged;  a  new  dining-room, 
studio,  tower,  and  gateway  were  added ;  and  the  copses, 
glens,  and  meadows  along  the  lake  were  included  in 
the  property.  Behind  it  the  moors  rise  in  a  series  of 
knolls,  cliflfs,  and  "fells,"  such  as  delight  the  soul  of 
those  who  know  all  the  inspiration  they  can  bring  to 
the  thoughtful  mind  and  to  the  jaded  spirit.  In  this 
delicious,  simple,  and  yet  easy  retreat,  the  last  twenty 
years  of  Ruskin's  life  gently  passed  on,  cherished  by 
the  loving  care  and  devotion  of  his  cousin,  his  almost 
adopted  daughter,  " Joanie,"  "Joanna,"  or  Joan,  Mrs. 
Arthur  Severn;  her  husband,  the  son  of  Joseph 
Severn  of  Rome,  the  friend  of  Keats ;  and  the  Severn 
family  of  two  sons  and  two  daughters.  None  of  those 
who  have  ever  been  privileged  to  enter  it  have  known 
a  home  more  entirely  pervaded,  as  its  very  atmosphere, 
%vith  grace,  simplicity,  and  kindness. 

The  house,  which  at  last  was  made  roomy  -without 
being  imposing,  quaint  and  old-fashioned  without  being 
in  the  least  "aesthetic"  or  "Morrissy"  (for  indeed  it 
long  retained  not  a  few  traces  of  the  Georgian  and  early 
Victorian  banalities),  houses  some  exquisite  remnants 
of  his  great  collections.  First  and  foremost,  the 
glorious  Titian,  the  Doge  Gritti,  two  Tintorettos,  a 
contemporary  portrait  of  Raphael,  portraits  of  Turner 
and  of  Reynolds  in  youth,  each  by  the  painter  himself, 
portraits  of  the  old  father  and  mother,  and  of  the  child 
John  by  Northcote,  -with  his  blue  sash,  blue  eyes,  and 
"blue  hills."  Ruskin's  own  bedroom  was  entirely  hung 
with  the  choice  specimens  of  Turner's  dra^vings,  which 


160  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

were  so  rapturously  described  in  his  various  books. 
His  0"v\Ti  library  had  a  case  of  exquisite  illuminated 
manuscripts,  some  rare  printed  books,  some  manuscript 
originals  of  Scott's  romances,  written  with  the  master's 
own  hand  in  quarto  pages  at  a  furious  pace,  legible  and 
very  little  disfigured  by  erasures ;  a  few  smaller  pieces 
of  Prout,  Hunt,  and  Burne- Jones;  and  cases  of  rare 
specimens  of  minerals  and  precious  stones.  Until  you 
had  closely  looked  at  all  these  things — the  choice 
remains  that  had  been  saved  out  of  the  splendid  collec- 
tions of  paintings,  engravings,  specimens,  and  works 
of  art  which  he  had  lavished  on  public  museums  and 
libraries — but  for  these  things,  you  would  not  immedi- 
ately perceive  that  you  were  in  anything  but  the 
ordinary  comfortable  home  of  a  retired  professional 
gentleman.  Here,  for  twenty  years,  after  life's  fitful 
fever,  John  Ruskin  sought  peace — and  enjoyed  it ;  but 
for  the  unforgotten  memory  of  what  he  had  loved  and 
hoped,  of  what  he  feared  and  loathed  in  the  world,  and 
the  attacks  of  malady,  from  which  he  had  no  absolute 
respite. 

Reports  of  the  world  outside,  of  the  failure  of  his 
philanthropic  schemes,  of  the  divergent  ways  of  friends, 
came  in  on  him  from  time  to  time,  and  fired  his  brain 
asrain  to  white  heat.  In  1882  he  had  another  attack 
of  brain  fever,  but  was  able  to  travel  in  August,  and  to 
work  at  French  churches,  and  again  in  the  Alps.  And, 
as  his  biographer  tells  us,  in  that  year  "  the  attacks  of 
brain  fever  had  passed  over  him  like  passing  storms, 
leaving  a  clear  sky."  And  accordingly  his  Oxford 
friends,  with  the  present  Sir  William  Richmond  at  their 
head,  insisted  on  his  re-election  as  Slade  Professor,  and 
he  resumed  his  lectures  there  in  March  1883.     During 


XII.]  ILLNESS— DISAPPOINTMENT— RETIREMENT  161 

that  year  lie  lectured  in  Oxford,  in  London,  and  at 
Ck)niston.  But  tliese  were  his  last  appearances  in 
public.  He  attempted  to  continue  his  Oxford  lectures 
during  1884.  He  flung  himself  into  a  rhapsody  en- 
titled "The  Storm  Cloud  of  the  Nineteenth  Century," 
in  which  the  dull  winter  of  1884  was  presented  to  a 
London  audience  as  an  outward  sign,  sent  to  reprove 
the  blasphemous  iniquity  in  which  the  age  was  steeped. 
His  Oxford  course  on  the  "Pleasures  of  England" 
seemed,  as  it  was  prepared,  so  erratic  to  his  best  friends, 
that  he  was  induced  to  substitute  for  them  readings  from 
his  own  earlier  books.  And  when  the  vote  for  a 
physiological  laboratory,  to  be  attached  to  the  Museum, 
was  passed  by  Convocation,  he  suddenly  resigned  his 
Professorship  for  the  second  time,  and  shook  from  his 
feet  the  dust  of  Oxford,  of  academies,  and  of  cities.  It 
was  but  the  warning  of  a  new  attack  of  brain  dis- 
turbance which  left  him  shattered  and  incapable  of 
continuous  thought. 

Modern  literature  contains  no  outbursts  of  poignant 
suffering,  no  revelations  of  self -tormenting  reveries  that 
can  exceed  those  ^vrung  from  Ruskin  in  these  dark 
hours.  Nothing  has  been  uttered  more  fierce,  more 
pathetic  by  Swift  or  Rousseau,  by  Byron  or  Carlyle. 
But  in  the  groans  of  Ruskin  there  is  no  trace  of 
personal  shame,  of  wounded  vanity,  of  cynicism,  or  of 
despair.  It  is  the  torture  endured  by  a  tender  spirit, 
morbidly  outraged  at  the  sight  of  grossness  and  cruelty ; 
it  is  a  noble  rage  against  vulgarity  and  wi'ong;  a 
resurrection  of  the  mediaeval  godliness  of  St.  Francis 
and  a  Kempis,  in  a  world  which  had  no  place  for  these 
saintly  ecstasies.  The  mental  and  physical  maladies 
under  which  these  agonies  of  a  pure  spirit  have  grown 

L 


162  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap, 

incorporated  in  English  literature,  cannot  be  ignored 
in  any  honest  record  of  the  abnormal  life  of  an 
unique  genius.  But  it  becomes  not  one  ^yho  has  but 
looked  on  these  afflictions  from  without,  but  partially 
informed  and  but  half  comprehending  them,  to  describe 
them  himself.  We  who  stand  afar  off  read  with  wonder 
his  words,  "  like  sweet  bells  jangled,  out  of  tune  and 
harsh,"  but  we  cannot  presume  to  analyse  the  mind 
from  whence  they  come.  Let  us  leave  the  sad  record 
as  it  is  told  us  by  his  chosen  friend  and  disciple. 

Mr.  Collingwood  was  his  friend,  his  secretary,  and 
his  biographer,  with  special  opportunities  to  know  and 
authority  to  speak.  He  says :  "  Over-stimulus  in 
childhood;  intense  application  to  work  in  youth  and 
middle  age,  under  conditions  of  discouragement,  both 
public  and  private,  which  would  have  been  fatal  to 
many  another  man;  and  this,  too,  not  merely  hard 
work,  but  work  of  an  intense  emotional  nature,  in- 
volving, in  his  view  at  least,  wider  issues  of  life  and 
death,  in  which  he  was  another  Jacob  wrestling  with 
the  angel  in  the  wilderness,  another  Savonarola 
imploring  reconciliation  between  God  and  man." 

"These  attacks  of  mental  disease,  which  at  his  re- 
call to  Oxford  seemed  to  have  been  safely  distanced, 
after  his  resignation  began  again  at  more  and  more 
frequent  intervals.  Crash  after  crash  of  tempest  fell  on 
him,  clearing  away  for  a  while  only  to  return  with 
fiercer  fury,  until  they  left  him  beaten  down  at  last,  to 
learn  that  he  must  accept  the  lesson  and  bow  before 
the  storm." 

"  All  that  I  now  remember  of  many  a  weary  night 
and  day  is  the  vision  of  a  great  soul  in  torment,  and 
through  purgatorial  fires  the  ineffable  tenderness  of  the 


XII.]  ILLNESS— DISAPPOINTMENT— RETIREMENT  163 

real  man  emerging,  with  his  passionate  appeal  for 
justice  and  baffled  desire  for  truth.  To  those  who 
could  not  follow  the  wanderings  of  a  wearied  brain,  it 
was  nothing  but  a  horrible  or  a  grotesque  nightmare. 
Some  in  those  trials  learned  as  they  could  not  other- 
wise have  learned  to  know  him,  and  to  love  him  as 
never  before."  "  There  were  many  periods  of  health, 
or  comparative  health,  even  in  those  years."  In  1888, 
Ruskin,  then  in  his  seventieth  year,  made  his  last 
journey  abroad;  but  it  did  not  revive  him  as  the 
journey  of  1882  had  done.  "Now,  his  best  hours  were 
hours  of  feebleness  and  depression ;  and  he  came  home 
to  Brantwood  in  the  last  days  of  the  year,  wearied  to 
death,  to  wait  for  the  end." 

So,  eleven  years  later,  but  a  year  or  so  before  his 
death,  I  foimd  him  in  his  quiet  Brantwood  home — to 
look  at  just  like  Lear  in  the  last  scene,  but  perfectly  re- 
poseful, gentle,  and  happy,  taking  the  air  of  the  fells 
with  delight,  joining  in  games  or  reading  -with  the 
family  at  intervals,  but  for  the  most  part  sitting  in  his 
library  and  softly  turning  over  the  pages  of  a  poem,  a 
tale  of  Walter  Scott,  or  Dickens,  or  some  illustrated 
volume  of  views,  himself  in  a  bower  of  roses  and  gay 
flowers ;  silently  and  for  long  intervals  together  gazing 
with  a  far-off  look  of  yearning,  but  nb  longer  of  eager- 
ness, at  the  blue  hiUs  of  the  Coniston  Old  Man,  across 
the  rippling  lake,  as  if — half  child  again,  half  wayworn 
pilgrim — he  saw  there  the  Delectable  Mountains  where 
the  T-vdcked  cease  from  troubling  and  the  weary  are  at 
rest. 


CHAPTER    XIII 

SOCIAL   EXPERIMENTS — GUILD   OF  ST.    GEORGE 

It  was  the  work  at  the  Working  Men's  College  in 
Great  Ormond  Street  which  definitely  turned  Ruskin's 
mind  to  social  problems  and  practical  remedies,  though 
strong  indications  of  his  interest  in  such  things  crop  up 
all  through  his  earUer  books,  and  were  very  marked  in 
the  Stones  of  Venice.  He  had  first  joined  the  College 
in  1854,  and  there  he  had  as  pupils,  and  soon  as  fellow- 
workers,  such  skilled  craftsmen  as  George  Allen,  W. 
Jeffery,  Arthur  Burgess,  and  William  Ward.  During 
1854,  -55,  -56,  and  -57,  his  lectures  on  Art  had  turned 
largely  on  the  forming  of  art  workmen  and  the  con- 
ditions of  life  under  which,  in  modern  society,  such 
men  could  be  trained.  In  1857  he  said,  "The  kind  of 
painting  they  most  wanted  in  London  was  painting 
cheeks  red  with  health.^  All  this  drove  him  to  face 
the  whole  question  of  Labour  and  Industry  under  the 
dominant  Capitalist  regime.  In  1857  he  lectured  at 
Manchester  on  the  "Political  Economy  of  Art,"  now 
printed  in  a  Joy  for  Ever,  which,  as  we  have  seen,  was 
essentially  an  indictment  of  the  current  views  of 
Plutonomy.  And  all  through  the  years  1857,  -58,  -59, 
he  was  frequently  enforcing  the  same  lesson,  that  the 
regeneration  of  Art  could  only  arise  out  of  a  re- 
organisation of  industry  as  now  practised.      Unto  this 

164 


CHAP,  xiii.]  SOCIAL  EXPERIMENTS  165 

Last,  in  1860,  was  the  Biblical  Contrat  Social  of  our 
Tory  J.  J.  Rousseau. 

All  the  books  from  the  close  of  the  Modern  Painters 
series  do^vn  to  the  retirement  from  London  repeat  and 
expand  this  thought,  and  in  the  Letters  addressed  to 
the  workman  of  Sunderland  (now  Time  and  Tide)  he  is 
consciously  appealing  to  the  labourer  on  his  daily  life 
in  direct  advice.  But  it  was  not  until  his  accession  to 
full  control  over  the  fortune  left  him  by  his  father 
that  Ruskin  began  to  deal  in  large  schemes  of  practical 
philanthropy.  From  the  time  when  he  first  had  money 
to  spend  at  all,  he  had  been  generous  to  the  point  of 
being  lavish.  Rossetti,  C.  A.  Howell,  and  many  of  whom 
the  public  knew  nothing,  were  helped  by  "  Ruskin  the 
good  Samaritan,  ever  gentle  and  open-handed,"  as  an 
unnamed  writer  called  him.  The  Oxford  Professorship 
of  1870  first  opened  to  him  a  career  of  the  munificent 
and  pious  founder.  He  began  with  forming  the  Ruskin 
Art  Museum,  \vith  Turners,  Tintorettos,  and  drawings 
by  modern  artists,  which  he  presented  to  the  Art 
galleries  of  Oxford. 

As  Mr.  Cook  tells  us,  "His  pensioners  were  num- 
bered by  hundreds ;  his  charities,  if  sometimes  indis- 
criminate, were  as  delicate  as  they  were  generous.  He 
educated  promising  artists,  and  gave  commissions  for 
semi-public  enterprises.  He  presented  valuable  collec- 
tions of  Turners  to  Oxford  and  to  Cambridge.  To 
the  Natural  History  Museum  he  presented  several 
mineralogical  specimens  ...  to  many  schools  and 
colleges  he  presented  cabinets  of  minerals  or  dramngs. 
In  some  forms  of  philanthropy  he  was  a  pioneer.  He 
established  a  model  tea-shop.  He  organised,  for  the 
relief   of   the    unemployed,    gangs    of    street   cleaners. 


166  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

He  was  the  first  to  give  Miss  Octavia  Hill  the  means 
of  managing  house  property  on  the  principle  of  helping 
the  tenants  to  help  themselves.  He  shared  as  well  as 
gave.  *  He  thought  no  trouble  too  great  to  encourage 
a  pupil  or  befriend  the  fallen." 

After  the  capture  of  Paris  in  January  1871,  Ruskin 
joined  a  "Paris  Food  Fund,"  to  which  he  gave  £50. 
In  November  of  that  year  he  gave  the  University  of 
Oxford  £5000  to  endow  a  mastership  of  drawing. 
He  gave  a  relative  £15,000  to  set  him  up  in  business. 
And  at  Christmas  he  gave  the  tithe  of  his  remaining 
capital  to  found  the  St.  George's  Company,  into  which 
so  much  of  his  money  and  his  energies  was  destined 
to  be  absorbed.  John  James  Ruskin  at  his  death  in 
1864  left  to  his  son,  we  are  told  in  Fors,  Letter  lxxvi., 
£157,000  in  money,  besides  pictures  and  houses.  In 
seven  years  the  son  had  but  half  of  this  left  after  his 
lavish  gifts ;  and  that  half  not  long  afterwards  followed 
the  first. 

The  first  letter  ot  Fors  Clavigera  was  dated  from 
Denmark  Hill  on  1st  January  1871,  and  it  announced 
his  descent  into  the  arena  of  practical  socialism.  "  For 
my  own  part,"  he  wrote,  "I  mil  put  up  with  this 
state  of  things  passively  not  an  hour  longer.  .  .  . 
I  simply  cannot  paint,  nor  read,  nor  look  at  minerals, 
nor  do  anything  else  that  I  like ;  and  the  very  light  of 
the  morning  sky  has  become  hateful  to  me,  because 
of  the  misery  that  I  know  of,  and  see  signs  of,  where 
I  know  it  not,  which  no  imagination  can  interpret  too 
bitterly.  Therefore  I  will  endure  it  no  longer  quietly ; 
but  henceforward,  -v^^th  any  few  or  many  who  will 
help,  do  my  poor  best  to  abate  this  misery."  On  the 
1st  of  May  1871,  in  Letter  v.  of  Fors — a  letter  which 


xm.]  SOCIAL  EXPERIMENTS  167 

Carlyle  hailed  as  "  incomparable ;  a  quasi-sacred  con- 
solation to  me,  which  almost  brings  tears  into  my 
eyes  ! " — Ruskin  expounded  the  scheme  of  St.  George's 
Company.  He  undertook  to  give  a  tenth  of  whatever 
was  then  left  him,  and  the  tithe  of  what  he  might 
earn  afterwards.  They  were  to  try  to  make  some 
small  piece  of  English  ground  beautiful,  peaceful,  and 
fruitful,  with  no  steam-engines  on  it,  and  no  railroads, 
with  no  untended  creatures  on  it ;  none  wretched  but 
the  sick;  none  idle  but  the  dead — no  liberty,  instant 
obedience,  no  equality.  On  this  Utopian  Paradise 
society  and  industry  were  to  be  regulated  on  strict 
lines  of  a  newly-ordered  scheme,  such  as  was  described 
in  the  Laws  of  Fesole  and  in  the  subsequent  letters  of 
Fiyrs,  For  this  new  phalanstery  Sir  Thomas  Dyke 
Acland  and  Lord  Mount  Temple  consented  to  be 
trustees  of  the  Fund.  But  the  public  did  not  respond. 
At  the  end  of  three  years  only  £236,  13s.  was  added 
to  the  original  £7000. 

He  then  set  himself  to  reclaim  some  of  the  "  slum  " 
dwellings  in  London ;  and  he  made  an  experiment  in 
some  nine  or  ten  houses  which  he  put  in  charge  of 
Miss  Octavia  Hill,  who  collected  the  rents,  and  in 
course  of  that  duty  learned  to  know  and  to  improve 
the  tenants.  But  ultimately  he  parted  with  them  for 
£3500,  all  of  which  sum  he  gave  away  to  others,  as 
he  said  merrily,  "like  snaw  afF  a  wa'."  Then  he  took 
a  house  in  Paddington,  and  started  a  tea-shop,  to  sell 
pure  tea  at  a  fair  price,  putting  an  old  servant  in 
charge.  To  the  tea  was  soon  added  coffee  and  sugar. 
And  we  are  told  the  shop  did  a  good  and  sound 
])usiness  till  Miss  Hill  took  this  over  also.  Then 
Ruskin  stai-ted  a  gang  of  street  sweepers  to  keep  the 


168  JOHN  RUSKIN  [ckap. 

streets  clean.  But  this  Augean-stable  task  was  beyond 
all  the  resources  of  himself,  his  friends,  and  his 
gardener. 

The  famous  experiment  in  book-selling  was  started 
in  1871  with  the  first  number  of  F&rs,  which  was  not 
to  be  published  in  the  usual  way,  but  was  sold  only 
by  Mr.  George  Allen  at  a  village  in  Kent.  It  was  not 
advertised,  there  was  no  discount,  no  abatement,  the 
price  was  sevenpence,  afterwards  raised  to  tenpence. 
In  spite  of  these  obstacles,  thousands  were  sold  of  each 
number.  Ultimately  the  system  wa.s  extended  and 
made  complete.  Euskin  had  long  complained  of  the 
methods  employed  in  the  book  trade  by  publishers  and 
booksellers  and  the  business  rules  and  understandings 
in  use;  and,  with  characteristic  self-\dll,  he  resolved 
to  be  his  own  publisher  and  bookseller.  His  aim  was 
to  offer,  without  any  middleman,  or  advertisement,  or 
commendation,  a  sound  article  at  a  price  that  would 
pay  fully  all  the  workmen  employed  on  it,  putting 
aside  all  competition,  trade  usages,  commissions,  or 
rebate.  The  author  charged  himself  with  obtaining 
paper  and  type  of  special  quality,  and  the  utmost  care 
and  skill  in  preparing  the  illustrative  plates.  Mr. 
Allen,  who  had  been  Euskin's  pupil  at  the  Working 
Men's  College,  an  engraver  by  trade,  became  the 
manager  of  the  great  business  which  was  carried  on 
Avith  marvellous  success  at  Orpington,  until  to  this 
was  added  the  Charing  Cross  Eoad  depot  as  a  London 
house. 

For  many  years  the  whole  of  Euskin's  works  were 
issued  from  Orpington  on  these  terms,  at  the  very 
high  prices  of  thirteen  shillings  unbound  for  ordinary 
volumes,  the  illustrated  volumes  at  twenty-two  shillings 


XIII.]  SOCIAL  EXPERIMENTS  169 

and   sixpence,   and   the    series   also   in   fine    bindings. 
That  Fors  should  have  been  sold  by  thousands  under 
conditions  so  troublesome  and  unusual,  that  immense 
issues  of  the  costly  volumes  should  have  found  buyers, 
was  an  extraordinary  tribute   to   the   author's   popu- 
larity.    As  years  went  on,  he  was  induced  to  see  that 
to  publish  his  writings  only  in  forms  which  no  moderate 
purses   could  meet  was   to   exclude  the  very  people 
whom   he  most  desired   to  reach.      And   at   last  the 
system  was  modified.     The  books  were  printed  in  a 
style  less  sumptuous,  and  sold  at  prices  more  modest. 
Arrangements   were   made   by    which   they   could    be 
obtained  through  ordinary  booksellers,  and  the  business 
of  Messrs.   Allen  is  now  carried  on  under  conditions 
more  like  those  of  a  great  publishing  house.     \ye  are 
told  that  for  many  years  the  profits  of  Mr.  Euskin's 
complete  works — and  they  number  between  forty  and 
fifty,  most  of  these  in  various  forms  and  editions — 
amounted  on  an  average  to  £4000  per  annum.      It 
was  indeed  all  that  he  had  to  live  on,  and  to  continue 
his  gifts,   for   he    had  given   away   the  whole  of   his 
capital,  and  but  for  his  copyrights,  he  would  be  actu- 
ally a  pauper. 

Mr.  Collingwood,  who  has  special  authority  to  speak 
on  a  personal  matter  of  the  kind,  tells  us  that  "  fortu- 
nate it  was  for  Mr.  Euskin  that  his  bold  attempt 
succeeded.  The  £200,000  he  inherited  from  his  parents 
had  gone — chiefly  in  gifts  and  in  attempts  to  do  good. 
The  interest  he  used  to  spend  on  himself ;  the  capital 
he  gave  away  until  it  totally  disappeared,  except  what 
is  represented  by  the  house  he  lived  in  and  its  con- 
tents, and  a  great  part  of  that  went  to  pensioners,  to 
whom  in  the  days  of  his  wealth  he  pledged  himself 


170  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

to  relatives  and  friends,  discharged  servants,  institu- 
tions in  which  he  took  an  interest  at  one  time  or  other. 
But  he  had  sufficient  for  his  wants,  and  no  need  to 
fear  poverty  in  his  old  age." 

The  most  important  of  all  E-uskin's  social  experi- 
ments, that  to  which  he  gave  his  whole  energy  and 
large  sums  for  many  years  between  1871  and  1884, 
was  the  Company,  or,  as  it  was  afterwards  called,  the 
Guild  of  St.  George.  The  scheme  is  so  characteristic 
in  its  conception  and  in  its  form,  and  throws  so  much 
light  on  Kuskin's  real  nature  and  inmost  ideas,  that 
it  is  necessary  to  treat  it  in  detail.  Few  apostles  of 
social  reform  in  our  age  have  ever  sought  to  put  their 
Utopias  in  practice,  or  to  found  material  institutions 
to  embody  their  ideas.  But  in  1871  Euskin,  finding 
himself  independent  of  all  ties,  a  man  of  wealth,  with 
a  great  reputation  and  powerful  friends,  resolved  to 
devote  his  resources  of  capital  and  of  intellect  to  give 
active  examples  of  the  New  Life. 

/  The  New  Life,  as  Euskin  conceived  it,  was  to  be — 
/  not  so  much  an  advance  upon  the  Present  as  a  revival 
of  the  Past.  It  was  in  spirit  Mediaeval,  but  purged 
from  the  cruelty  of  Feudalism  and  the  superstition 
of  Catholicism.  It  was  to  be  neither  Communist  nor 
Monastic ;  for  it  was  to  carry  to  the  highest  point  of 
development  the  institutions  of  hereditary  property 
and  of  family  life.  It  was  to  show  the  world  Chivalry 
without  War,  Devoutness  without  a  Church,  Nobility 
without  Luxury  or  Sloth,  and  Monarchy  mthout  Pro- 
fligacy or  Pride.  The  type  was  a  knight's  fee  of  the 
thirteenth  century  in  Tuscany — as  of  some  idealised 
Bellincion  Berti  of  the  Commedia — some  captain  re- 
turned from  the  Crusades  who  should  devote  himself 


XIII.]  SOCIAL  EXPERIMENTS  171 

to  good  works  and  guiding  the  yeomen  who  called  hiia 
lord.  It  was  to  be  a  glorified  mediaeval  lordship,  fully 
equipped  with  the  order,  comforts,  and  appliances  of 
modern  existence,  but  purged  of  its  vices,  its  frauds, 
its  base  machinery,  and  its  sordid  habits.       ' 

The  scheme  rested  on  the  central  ideas  on  which 
Euskin's  whole  philosophy  was  based — (1)  That  there  j 
could  be  no  civilisation  without  practical  religion;  (2) 
no  prosperity  apart  from  labour  on  the  soil ;  and  (3)  no 
happiness  without  honesty  and  truth.  The  task  of  St. 
George  was  to  slay  the  dragon  of  Industrialism;  to 
deliver  the  people  from  all  the  moral  and  physical 
abominations  of  city  life,  and  plant  them  again  on  the 
soil  of  an  England  purified  from  steam,  from  filth,  and 
from  destitution.  In  this  regenerated  country  there 
were  to  be  no  competition,  no  engines,  no  huckstering, 
no  fraud,  no  luxury,  no  idleness,  no  pernicious  jour- 
nalism, no  vain  erudition  or  mechanical  book-learning. 
There  were  to  be  three  essential  Material  things — Pure 
Air,  Water,  and  Earth — and  three  essential  Immaterial 
things — Admiration,  Hope,  and  Love.  And  in  Letter 
V.  of  Fors  (1st  May  1871)  he  enlarges  on  the  way  to 
reach  these  six  requisites  of  rational  life. 

The  first  idea  of  St.  George's  Company  was  to 
buy  land  which  was  to  be  cultivated  by  manual 
industry,  and  rear  a  happy  peasantry,  with  education, 
amusements,  music,  and  art,  suitable  to  their  intelli- 
gence. They  were  to  be  paid  at  fixed  rates  of  wages 
till  they  owned  their  own  land.  Rich  and  poor  were 
invited  to  come  in,  if  they  would  work  hard  with  plain 
living ;  or  to  subscribe,  if  they  would  be  content  to  see 
their  money  diffusing  happiness  rather  than  bearing 
interest.     For  this  end  the  rich  were  exhorted  to  con- 


172  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

tribute  a  tenth  of  their  income,  as  the  Master  of  the 
Company  had  done;  but,  to  his  surprise  and  sorrow, 
none  of  those  on  whom  Providence  had  bestowed  the 
good  things  of  this  world  took  advantage  of  the  offered 
investment.  The  scheme  grew,  and  was  developed 
and  expounded  for  ten  or  twelve  years  in  Fors;  but 
almost  no  funds,  and  very  few  Companions,  were 
added. 

It  is  useless  to  attempt  to  describe  in  any  systematic 
way  a  project  which  could  not  have,  perhaps  was  not 
intended  to  have,  any  systematic  form  at  all.  But,  to 
gain  some  notion  of  what  it  meant,  of  all  the  inco- 
herences into  which  his  dream  plunged  Ruskin,  as  well 
as  of  all  the  noble  aims  at  which  he  was  striving,  it 
may  be  well  to  analyse  the  Letter  LVlil.  in  the  third 
volume  of  Fors,  premising  that  it  was  written  in  the 
autumn  of  1875,  in  the  agony  of  the  time  when  he  was 
mourning  the  death  of  the  girl  he  loved,  who  on  her 
deathbed  had  refused  to  see  him.  Letter  LViii.  opens 
with  the  second  collect  at  Evening  Prayer  :  "0  God,  from 
whom  all  holy  desires,  all  good  counsels,  and  all  just 
works  do  proceed,"  which  he  quotes  from  the  Catholic 
service,  complaining  of  its  "adulteration"  in  the 
English  ritual  (by  the  way,  Ruskin  in  his  own  version 
quite  mangles  the  magnificent  roll  of  this  typical  prayer). 
He  breaks  out  into  a  furious  invective  against  those 
Avho  utter  this  prayer  weekly,  without  understanding 
it,  determined  to  put  no  check  on  their  natural 
covetousness,  to  act  on  their  own  opinions,  to  do  what- 
ever they  can  make  money  by,  to  be  just  or  unjust,  and 
to  thrust  themselves  into  the  "  most  betrumpeted  booth 
in  the  Fair  of  the  World." 

In  contrast  with  such  persons,  every  one  received  into 


XIII.]  SOCIAL  EXPERIMENTS  173 

the  Company  of  St.  George  must  write  out  and  sign  the 
follo\\T[ng  Creed  : — 

"I.  I  trust  in  the  Living  God,  Father  Almighty, 
Maker  of  heaven  and  earth,  and  of  all  things  and 
creatures  visible  and  invisible. 

"  I  trust  in  the  kindness  of  His  law  and  the  goodness 
of  His  work.  And  I  will  strive  to  love  Him,  and  keep 
His  law,  and  see  His  work,  while  I  live. 

"  n.  I  trust  in  the  nobleness  of  human  nature,  in  the 
majesty  of  its  faculties,  the  fulness  of  its  mercy,  and  the 
joy  of  its  love. 

'  And  I  will  strive  to  love  my  neighbour  as  myself, 
and,  even  when  I  cannot,  will  act  as  if  I  did. 

"III.  I  will  labour,  with  such  strength  and  oppor- 
tunity as  God  gives  me,  for  my  own  daily  bread ;  and 
all  that  my  hand  finds  to  do,  I  vnll  do  with  all  my 
might. 

"IV.  I  will  not  deceive,  or  cause  to  be  deceived,  any 
human  being  for  my  gain  or  pleasure ;  nor  hurt,  or  cause 
to  be  hurt,  any  human  being  for  my  gain  or  pleasure ; 
nor  rob,  or  cause  to  be  robbed,  any  human  beino-  for 
my  gain  or  pleasure. 

"  V.  I  -will  not  kill  nor  hurt  any  living  creature  need- 
lessly, nor  destroy  any  beautiful  thing,  but  will  strive  to 
save  and  comfort  all  gentle  life,  and  guard  and  perfect 
all  natural  beauty  upon  the  earth. 

"YI.  I  will  strive  to  raise  my  own  body  and  soul 
daily  into  higher  powers  of  duty  and  happiness ;  not  in 
rivalship  or  contention  ^\-ith  others,  but  for  the  help, 
delight,  and  honour  of  others,  and  for  the  joy  and  peace 
of  my  own  life. 

"  VII.  I  will  obey  all  the  laws  of  my  country  faith- 
fully, and  the  orders  of  its  monarch,  and  of  all  persons 


174  JOHN  RUSKIN  [CHAP. 

appointed  to  be  in  authority  under  its  monarch,  so  far 
as  such  laws  or  commands  are  consistent  with  what  I 
suppose  to  be  the  law  of  God ;  and  if  they  are  not,  or 
seem  in  any  wise  to  need  change,  I  will  oppose  them 
loyally  and  deliberately,  not  with  malicious  concealment, 
or  disorderly  violence. 

"  VIII.  And  with  the  same  faithfulness,  and  under  the 
limits  of  the  same  obedience,  which  I  render  to  the  law 
of  my  country  and  the  commands  of  its  rulers,  I  will 
obey  the  laws  of  the  Society  called  of  St.  George,  into 
which  I  am  this  day  received ;  and  the  orders  of  its 
masters,  and  of  all  persons  appointed  to  be  in  authority 
under  its  masters,  so  long  as  I  remain  a  Companion 
called  of  St.  George." 

The  author  of  this  Creed  imagined  that  no  sincerely 
good  and  religious  person  would  refuse  to  profess  and 
sign  these  articles  of  belief.  But  this  is  a  sanguine 
view.  The  second  article  is  the  direct  negation  of  the 
orthodox  Christian  view  of  the  desperate  wickedness  of 
the  human  heart  and  the  miserable  feebleness  of  man. 
Besides  this,  the  nobleness  of  Humanity,  its  majesty, 
mercy,  and  love,  is,  in  a  religious  sense,  the  doctrine 
only  of  Positivists,  and  is  repudiated  by  most  sceptics 
and  agnostics  as  well  as  by  Christians.  Article  V. 
would  be  a  stumblingblock  and  offence,  not  only  to  all 
who  care  for  any  form  of  "sport,"  but  to  almost  all 
persons  outside  the  pale  of  some  avowed  humanitarian 
propaganda.  Whether  Articles  VIL  and  YIIL  imply 
the  obedience  of  Jesuits  to  their  General,  perinde  ac 
cadaver^  is  not  evident.  But  the  saving  clause  that 
obedience  is  limited  by  what  the  Companion  himself 
"supposes  to  be  law  of  God,"  would  justify  the  most 
stubborn  resistance  of  any  Puritan,  Quaker,  Covenanter, 


XIII.]  SOCIAL  EXPERIMENTS  175 

or  Anabaptist ;  and  a^  the  Master  of  St.  George  himself 
defied  many  of  the  ordinary  ways  of  modern  civilised 
life,  a  considerable  latitude  was  opened  to  private 
judgment. 

For  example,  he  sought  for  the  Company  the  power 
of  holding  land,  but  would  not  comply  with  the  con- 
ditions required  by  law  for  registering  the  Company, 
though  these  were  exacted  simply  to  prevent  fraud  and 
waste.  St.  George  was  also  to  have  its  o^vn  coinage, 
though  how  this  could  be  done  without  trenching  on 
the  prerogative  of  "the  monarch,"  and  breaking  the 
law  as  to  "  coining,"  is  not  clear.  The  new  coins  were 
to  be  pure  gold  and  pure  silver  without  alloy.  The 
wastage  was  of  no  consequence,  though  perhaps  the 
new  soft  coins  would  soon  be  reduced  to  the  form  of 
boys'  toy  marbles.  Kents  were  to  be  strictly  required 
of  tenants;  but  then  they  were  to  be  lowered,  not 
raised,  upon  improvements  made  by  the  tenant,  and 
entirely  used  for  the  benefit  of  the  tenant  and  the 
estate. 

The  great  law  of  St.  George  was  to  be  "  no  use  of 
steam  power,  nor  of  any  machines  where  arms  w^ill 
serve."  Tools  are  not  forbidden;  and  "arms"  here 
means  limbs,  not  weapons.  The  laws  in  general  were 
to  be  old  English  laws  revived,  or  else  Florentine  or 
Roman,  but  none  but  such  as  have  been  in  use  amongst 
great  nations.  The  Government  was  vested  in  a 
Master,  or  General,  with  Marshals,  landlords  under 
him,  and  ordinary  Companions,  the  type  of  the  land- 
lord being  Richard  Cceur-de-Lion.  Ultimately  there 
were  to  be  Bishops  and  Centurions,  but  these  were  not 
to  take  account  of  opinions  and  spiritual  things,  but  of 
practical  ways  of  life  and  material  conditions,  honesty, 


176  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

and  conduct  in  general.  The  grand  object  of  St. 
George  was  to  be  the  accumulation  of  national  wealth 
and  store  (the  store  being  food,  clothing,  good  books, 
good  works  of  art,  the  poison  being  expurgated  out  of 
them),  and  the  distribution  to  the  poor  instead  of 
taxation  of  them.  Prices,  and  even  saleable  articles, 
were  to  be  fixed  by  the  Government,  at  least  a  minimum 
price  and  a  standard  of  purity ;  all  bad  food,  clothes, 
or  articles  were  to  be  destroyed.  There  was  one 
delightfully  droll  law.  Wine  was  allowed,  but  only 
wine  that  was  more  than  ten  years  old.  Away  with 
your  "Gladstone  Clarets,"  "Bas  Medocs,"  and  such 
stufif!  Surely  there  spoke  the  son  of  the  old  sherry 
merchant,  "  entirely  honest,"  who  would  have  none  of 
your  modern  cheap  drinks.  Dress  would  be  prescribed 
to  mark  distinction  of  classes ;  hereditary  orders  were 
recognised ;  luxury  would  be  made  infamous ;  and,  if 
jewels  were  used,  they  must  be  uncut. 

It  is  needless  to  go  through  all  the  prescriptions  of 
St.  George  which  are  scattered  over  the  ninety-six 
Letters  of  Fors,  extending  over  the  fourteen  years  from 
January  1871  to  Christmas  1884.  The  noticeable 
point  is  this :  St.  George  is  not  a  social  Utopia,  such  as 
was  imagined  by  Plato,  or  Dante,  Sir  Thomas  More, 
or  Eousseau.  It  Avas  an  actually  constituted  body  of 
practical  reformers,  into  which  a  man  of  genius  flung 
his  capital,  his  energies,  his  reputation,  and  his  very 
life ;  which  lasted  for  twenty  years  as  a  working  model 
of  the  New  Life,  and  may  be  nominally  and  technically 
at  work  still  in  some  form.  And  it  was  an  experiment, 
almost  impossible  to  classify,  or  to  bring  into  com- 
parison with  any  known  type  of  social  Utopia.  It 
was  to  be  fervently  religious,  without  any  consistent 


XIII.]  SOCIAL  EXPERIMENTS  177 

religious  creed  except  a  Theism,  half  Biblical,  half 
artistic.  It  was  Socialist,  in  that  it  was  to  divert  all 
production  from  a  personal  to  a  public  use ;  but  then  it 
preserved  and  stimulated  the  institution  of  hereditary- 
property  and  the  ascendency  of  the  orders  who  owned 
it.  It  was  wildly  anarchic  in  its  defiance  of  all  the 
habits  and  appliances  of  modern  life,  and  yet  it  inculcated 
an  obedience  not  found  outside  a  religious  order.  It 
was  to  free  Labour  from  the  tyranny  of  Capital  in 
order  to  put  it  under  the  tyranny  of  a  discipline  more 
stringent  than  that  of  a  Jesuit  school.  The  ideal  would 
have  satisfied  St.  Francis  and  St.  Theresa,  except  that 
there  was  nothing  ascetic  in  it,  and  also  it  was  essen- 
tially concerned  with  laymen  enjoying  a  hearty  and 
beautiful  life.  It  might  have  satisfied  those  who 
listened  with  rapture  to  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount, 
except  that  it  extolled  the  splendour  of  Chivalry,  sub- 
mission to  the  rich  and  the  nobly  born,  and  a  general 
zest  for  all  innocent  gaiety  and  beautiful  things.  No- 
thing, of  course,  ever  came  of  St.  George.  But  it  will 
long  live  as  the  pathetic  dream  of  a  beautiful  but  lonely 
spirit  to  flee  from  the  wrath  that  is,  and  to  find 
salvation  in  a  purer  world. 

One  offshoot  of  St.  George  has  been  a  real  success — 
the  Sheffield  Art  Museum,  which  he  founded  with  such 
generous  gifts  and  noble  enthusiasm.  A  full  account 
of  it  has  been  given  in  Mr.  E.  T.  Cook's  Studies  in 
RusUn,  1890.  He  started  this  in  1875  to  be  a  collec- 
tion of  specimens  of  really  valuable  human  work;  he 
added  specimens  of  art  products  to  it  out  of  his  own 
collections,  or  bought  by  his  own  purse  ;  and  ultimately 
it  has  been  taken  over  in  trust  by  the  Corporation. 
This   is   perhaps    the    only   remaining    result   of    any 

M 


178  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

importance  of  so  many  years  of  anxiety  and  toil,  of 
such  generous  sacrifices,  of  such  noble  ideals  which 
were  embodied  in  the  Utopia  of  St.  George,  the 
mediaeval  symbol  of  England,  of  chivalry,  and  of 
culture  of  the  soil. 

It  would  be  an  ungracious  task  to  record  the  pitiful 
story  of  the  industrial  projects  which  grew  out  of  the 
central  company.  How  a  small  knot  of  Secularists, 
Unitarians,  and  Quakers  induced  the  Guild  to  buy  a 
farm  for  them  to  start  a  Communist  project  for 
£2287,  16s.  6d. ;  how  the  Communists  discovered  they 
could  not  farm ;  how  two  acres  of  rock  and  moor  were 
given  at  Barmouth,  and  twenty  acres  of  woodland  at 
Bewdley,  and  nothing  grew  on  either ;  how  a  homespun 
woollen  industry  without  steam  was  started  in  the  Isle 
of  Man;  how  hand-spinning  and  hand-loom  weaving 
were  carried  on  at  Langdale ;  how  the  May  Queens  at 
Chelsea  were  crowned  and  decorated ;  how,  after  seven 
years,  the  Master  came  to  see  that  all  interest  on  realised 
capital  was  usury  forbidden  by  Scripture,  an  abomina- 
tion in  the  sight  of  God  and  of  man ;  how,  finally,  he 
came  to  act  strictly  on  this  strange  delusion  which,  if 
generally  adopted,  would  destroy  the  bases  of  civilisa- 
tion. Rent  of  lands  remained,  he  held,  lawful  and 
serviceable  business,  though  rent  is  merely  annual 
payment  for  the  loan  of  Capital, 

It  would  need  a  volume  to  recount  all  his  schemes, 
projects,  acts  of  munificence — his  gifts,  his  indul- 
gences and  forgivenesses,  his  pets,  his  interests,  his 
gardening,  and  his  planting,  his  boating  and  his  sailing, 
his  delight  at  finding  an  old  dalesman  who  could  build, 
but  could  neither  read  nor  write,  his  love  of  animals, 
of  children,  of  Avomen  very  old  and  very  young,  his 


XIII.]  SOCIAL  EXPERIMENTS  179 

inexhaustible  activity,  and  his  yet  more  inexhaustible 
generosity,  his  power  of  attracting  devotion  from  his 
friends  and  assistants.  Mr.  Collingwood  writes  :  "He 
loves  many  things,  you  have  found.  He  is  different 
from  other  men  you  know,  just  by  the  breadth  and 
vividness  of  his  sympathies,  by  power  of  living  as  few 
other  men  can  live,  in  Admiration,  Hope,  and  Love. 
Is  not  such  a  life  worth  li\ang  whatever  its  monument 
be?" 

Yes ;  and  we  must  add,  whatever  its  errors  be,  what- 
ever its  failures  be.  The  ninety-six  Letters  of  Fors 
contain  the  tale  of  a  long  career  of  failures,  blunders, 
and  cruel  disappointment.  They  contain,  too,  the 
record  of  that  damning  perversity  of  mind  and  of 
character  which  ruined  Ruskin's  life  and  neutralised 
his  powers,  the  folly  of  presuming  to  recast  the  thought  | 
of  humanity  de  iwvo^  and  alone ;  to  remould  ci\^lisation ' 
by  mere  passion  without  due  training  or  knowledge; 
attempting  alone  to  hurl  human  society  back  into  a 
wholly  imaginary  and  fictitious  past.  Yet,  let  us  re- 
member— 

"  It  was  a  grievous  fault. 
And  grievously  hath  Caesar  answered  it.'' 

But  there  are  some  failures  more  beautiful  and  more 
useful  to  mankind  than  a  thousand  triumphs.  It  is 
impossible  to  weigh  the  value,  or  to  judge  the  legiti- 
macy, of  a  hopeless  but  heroic  sacrifice.  Those  w^ho  die 
in  a  forlorn  hope  are  remembered  long  years  after  their 
attempts  have  failed.  The  monk  Telemachus,  who 
rushed  into  the  Arena  at  Rome  and  put  an  end  to 
gladiatorial  shows,  was  called  at  the  time  a  meddling 
fanatic  by  the  people  who  stoned  him  to  death.     So, 


180  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap.  xiii. 

too,  John  Brown  the  abolitionist  was  held  to  be  when 
his  body  lay  mouldering  in  the  grave.  But  his  soul 
went  marching  along,  as  the  herald  of  the  cause  for 
which  he  gave  his  life.  How  many  centuries  passed 
before  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  bore  fruit — long  ages 
after  the  Preacher  had  been  led  out  to  death  \nth  jeers 
and  spitting !  And  how  mixed  and  dubious  has  even 
that  fruit  been  found  !  In  things  social  and  religious 
it  is  the  fervour  of  belief,  the  loathing  of  falsehood,  the 
abandonment  of  every  self-interested,  and  even  of  every 
prudential  motive,  which  tells  in  the  end.  Magnanimity 
owes  no  account  of  its  acts  to  Prudence.  No ;  nor  to 
Common  Sense. 


CHAPTER    XIV 

FORS  CLAVIGERA 

The  last  two  works  of  importance  which  Ruskin  pub- 
lished—the last  of  his  writings,  except  incidental 
lectures,  notes,  or  memoranda  —  Fors  Clavigera  and 
Prmterita  —  have  a  character  quite  unlike  his  main 
treatises,  a  character  almost  unique  in  literature.  Both 
are  mainly  autobiographical;  desultory,  incoherent, 
self-revealing,  personal  to  a  degree  of  which  there  is 
hardly  any  equal  example  in  our  language ;  and  they 
are  composed  in  a  style  in  strange  contrast  to  that  of 
the  art  studies  which  made  the  name  of  Ruskin  famous 
in  the  whole  reading  world.  Fors  has  been  pronounced 
by  foreign,  and  by  some  English,  readers  to  be  "un- 
intelligible," and  by  some  contemporary  critics  to  be 
"  crazy  "  and  "grotesque."  It  contains  much  of  Ruskin's 
most  typical  thoughts. 

That  the  ninety-six  Letters  which  now  fill  four  vol- 1 
umes  of  Fors  are  fantastic,  wayward,  egoistic,  as  is  no  1 
other  book  in  our  language — this  is  perfectly  true.  It 
is  true  also,  and  pity  'tis  'tis  true,  that  some  parts  of 
the  series  must  be  judged  to  be,  at  the  least,  on  the 
very  border  line  that  marks  off  rational  discourse  from 
morbid  wandering  of  mind.  The  series  of  Letters, 
after  seven  years,  was  interrupted  for  some  two  years 
by  acute  cerebral  disease,  and  was  irregularly  continued 

181 


182  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

some  time  later,  with  diminished  power.  But  if  we 
look  calmly  at  all  these  ninety-six  Letters  taken  to- 
gether, we  shall  see  a  very  definite  purpose  and  plan 
of  action  running  through  the  whole  :  the  revelation  of 
a  mind  of  marvellous  brilliancy,  richness,  and  culture ; 
of  a  nature  of  exquisite  tenderness,  generosity,  and 
candour.  Fors  is  Ruskin's  Hamlet.  And  if  there  are 
times  when  incoherence  seems  to  be  passing  into  delu- 
sion, these  soliloquies,  tirades,  and  confessions  vivisect  for 
us  a  heart  of  rare  passion  and  a  brain  of  fascinating  gifts. 

Fors  is  indeed  the  typical  work  of  the  man  John 
Ruskin,  apart  from  his  special  studies  and  teaching  in 
the  arts.  His  whole  soul  is  there  unveiled  to  us  over 
a  period  of  fourteen  years :  for  the  most  part  the  epoch 
of  malady,  disappointment,  and  decay — it  may  be,  but 
the  epoch  also  of  his  deepest  meditations  ajid  his  most 
ardent  dreams.  To  his  fervid  disciples,  his  intimates, 
his  fellow-believers  and  fellow-workers,  Fors  remains 
still  his  essential  gospel  or  message  to  a  perverse  world. 
To  the  cynical  critic  it  is  evidence  of  brain  disease  and 
a  nature  disordered  with  Quixotic  self-absorption  and 
querulous  nostrums  of  his  own  invention.  More 
reasonable  judges  will  agree  with  neither  extreme. 
They  will  see,  self-unveiled,  a  noble  nature  and  beauti- 
ful aspirations,  and  they  will  see  with  pain  how  these 
rare  qualities  were  debarred  from  bearing  fruit  by 
indomitable  arrogance,  and  by  a  sort  of  mental  and 
moral  incontinence,  which  habitually  hovered  on  the 
borders  of  sheer  hallucination. 

This  is  how  Fors  is  described  by  Mr.  Collingwood  in 
his  authoritative  and  elaborate  biography  : — 

"To  read  Fors  is  like  being  out  in  a  thunderstorm.  At 
first,  you  open  the  book  with  interest,  to  watch  the  signs  of 


XIV.]  FOnS  GLAVIGERA  183 

the  times.  Whilst  you  climb  your  mountain,  at  unawares 
there  is  a  darkening  of  the  cloud  upon  you,  and  the  tension  of 
instinctive  dread,  as  image  after  image  arises  of  misery,  and 
murder,  and  lingering  death,  with  here  and  there  a  streak  of 
sun  in  the  foreground,  only  throwing  the  wildness  of  the  scene 
into  more  rugged  relief ;  and  through  the  gaps  you  see  broad 
fields  of  ancient  history,  like  lands  of  promise  left  behind. 
By  and  by  the  gloom  wraps  you.  The  old  thunder  of  the 
Kuskinian  paragraph,  shortened  now  to  whip-lash  cracks, 
reverberates  unremittingly  from  point  to  point,  raising  echoes, 
sounding  deeps  ;  allusions,  suggestions,  intimations  stirring 
the  realm  of  chaos,  that  ordinarily  we  are  glad  to  let  slumber, 
but  now  terribly  discern,  by  flashes  of  thought,  most  un- 
expectedly arriving.  Fascinated  by  the  hammer-play  of  Thor, 
berserking  among  Rime-giants — customs  that  '  hang  upon  us, 
heavy  as  frost' — you  begin  to  applaud  ;  when  a  sudden  stroke 
rolls  your  own  standpoint  into  the  abyss.  But  if  you  can 
cKmb  forward,  undismayed,  to  the  summit,  the  storm  drifts 
by ;  and  you  see  the  world  again,  all  new,  beneath  you — 
how  rippling  in  Thoi-'s  laughter,  how  tenderly  veiled  in  his 
tears  ! " 

Whatever  this  may  mean,  it  will  serve  to  show  that 
the  irrepressible  incoherences,  inconsequences,  and 
gyrations  of  Fors  are  believed  to  have  a  real  and  very 
potent  Gospel  to  expound  under  all  their  flames  and 
scintillations.  And  in  truth  they  have.  Fors  is  not 
only  Ruskin's  Hamlet,  but  it  is  also  his  Apocalypse. 
But  anything  less  like  Thor  than  Fors  it  is  difficult  to 
imagine,  or  indeed  anything  less  like  the  style  of  Fors 
than  tbe  passage  just  cited  from  his  biographer.  But 
the  comparison  of  Fors  to  a  thunderstorm  has  a  certain 
meaning  in  this  way.  It  produces  on  us  the  effect  of 
some  strange  electrical  disturbance  in  the  heavens, 
which  we  watch  with  wonder  and  admiration,  constantly 
struck  by  some  unexpected  flash,  from  whence  coming. 


184  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

whither  going,  we  know  not,  but  always  beautiful  and 
profoundly  impressive. 

As  we  have  seen,  the  style  in  which  Fors  is  written 
is  utterly  different  from  that  of  the  earlier  books  on 
Art,  in  that  it  has  not  a  trace  of  rhetoric,  word-painting, 
or  laboured  composition  in  any  form.  It  is  throughout 
a  masterpiece  of  simple,  graceful,  pellucid  English,  like 
the  most  easy  and  natural  speech.  It  flows  on  in  one 
fascinating  causerie,  as  it  might  fall  from  the  lips  of  a 
perfect  master  of  the  art  of  familiar  conversation.  In 
a  second  point,  it  is  written  in  a  style  of  which  there 
is  no  other  example  in  the  language — a  style  of  un- 
measured abandon^  of  surrender  to  any  fancy,  whim, 
association  of  the  passing  moment.  Nothing  so  utterly 
inconsequent,  so  rambling,  so  heterogeneous  exists  in 
print.  And  yet,  the  connotations  of  ideas  are  so 
fantastic,  and  the  transitions  so  original,  that  the  effect 
of  the  whole  is  charming  as  well  as  exciting. 

The  form  of  Fors  is  so  singular  in  itself,  and  of  a 
perfection  of  its  own  so  rare,  that  it  may  be  studied  in 
detail.     In  the  first  place,  in  all  these  two  thousand 

I  pages  of  the  four  volumes,  dealing  with  things  as 
miscellaneous  and  diverse  as  the  words  in  the  Standard 

1  Dictionary  of  the  English  language,  it  would  be  hard 
to  find  a  single  sentence  which  was  not  quite  clear  and 
obvious  to  the  most  ordinary  reader.  He  might  not 
understand  all  the  allusions,  poetic  and  historical 
references,  the  epigrams  and  the  sarcasm,  but  he  would 
perfectly  understand  the  meaning  of  the  words.  The 
sentences  are  as  clear,  simple,  direct  as  those  of  Swift, 
but  without  the  coarseness  or  the  grittiness  of  the 
fierce  Dean.  Fors  runs  on  with  an  easy  mother-speech 
such  as  Bunyan,  Defoe,  Swift,  or  Goldsmith  never  sur- 


XIV.]  FOBS  CLA  VIOERA  185 

passed;  but,  at  the  same  time,  with  a  grace  and  a 
^vitche^y  of  fancy  that  the  sardonic  Dean  of  St.  Patrick's 
would  have  scorned  to  show. 

In  the  second  place,  it  would  be  hard  to  find  in  these  \ 
two  thousand  pages  a  single  dull,  conventional,  wooden  1 
sentence.     However  nonsensical  in  thought  the  remark  ^ 
may  be,  however  childish  in  tone — and  there  are  many 
remarks  both  nonsensical  and  childish — there  is  a  kind 
of  gentle  humour,  of  fantastic  waggery  in  the  phrasing, 
which  is  pleasing  and  quaint,  takes  it  out  of  the  ruck 
of  mere  balderdash,  and  places  it  in  line  ^vith  the  play- 
fulness of  genius.     The  tone  is  at  heart  that  of  S^^dft 
in  Lilliput,  or  of  Carlyle  in  Sartor,  or  of  Thackeray  in 
the  Booh  of  Snohs.     The  substance  is  a  satire  on  our 
modern   vices,   ignorances,   and  vulgarities.      But  the 
form  is  that  of  child's  play,  badinage,  musical  raillery, 
and  courteous  irony. 

The  reader  of  Fors  must  understand  that  the  whole 
series  of  Letters  are  cast  in  a  tone  of  irony,  sustained 
pathos,  profound  sadness,  clothed  with  a  veil  of  humour- 
and  even  of  levity,  but  always  free  from  the  savage  bitter- 
ness of  Swift  and  from  the  uncouth  mockery  of  Carlyle. 
The  indignation  is  as  deep  as  theirs,  but  it  is  softened 
into  fantastic  playfulness.  Such  is  the  nature  of  the 
man,  and  we  m.ust  take  him  as  we  find  him.  And  if 
Euskin  contrasts  himself  with  Theseus,  it  is  in  the 
same  spirit  of  sardonic  irony  as  that  in  which  Hamlet 
contrasts  himself  Avith  Hercules ;  or,  if  Euskin  gives  us 
biographic  details  of  his  childish  life,  it  is  as  Hamlet 
jests  in  pensive  earnest  with  the  skull  of  Yorick  at 
the  grave  of  Ophelia.  Fors  is  a  satire  on  modern  life,  \ 
cast  in  a  form  of  graceful  trifling. 

From  the  literary  point  of  view,  its  wonderful  quality 


186  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

lies  in  the  utterly  unexpected  and  incalculable  sequence 
of  ideas.  Each  paragraph,  each  sentence,  we  may  almost 
say,  each  phrase,  seems  to  be  the  last  which  a  reader 
would  look  to  follow  the  preceding.  It  would  seem  to 
have  no  connection  at  all  till  we  notice  the  subtle, 
often  fantastic,  sometimes  almost  verbal  nexus  of 
thought  which  unites  one  passage  with  another.  The 
transition  is  so  sharp,  so  incalculable,  and  yet  so  grace- 
ful, at  any  rate  so  quaint,  that  the  impression  is  usually 
pleasant,  and  is  never  obscure.  The  reader's  attention 
is  kept  at  a  pleasing  excitement,  by  the  fact  that  he 
cannot  imagine  what  is  coming  next;  that  when  the 
next  thought  is  presented,  it  seems  wildly  incongruous, 
until  the  link  of  ideas  is  perceived.  And  the  link  shows 
itself  before  the  sentence  is  finished. 

It  must  be  admitted  that  the  limits  of  playful  incon- 
sequence are  at  times  strained  or  passed.  There  are 
passages,  no  doubt,  even  those  retained  in  the  reduced 
and  revised  "new  edition"  of  1896,  that  can  hardly 
be  said  to  be  composed  b}^  a  man  in  perfect  command 
of  his  own  thoughts.  Ever  since  his  great  cerebral 
attack,  things  were  wont  occasionally  to  drop  from 
Euskin's  tongue  or  his  pen  somewhat  as  from  a  man 
under  the  influence  of  a  drug,  or  as  if  he  were  talking 
in  his  sleep.  Words,  sounds,  or  chance  associations, 
suggest  a  new  topic,  haviiig  only  some  verbal  connec- 
tion but  no  logical  coherence,  almost  like  the  association 
of  two  punning  words.  He  says  himself  (Letter  LXll.) 
that  any  gambolling  on  his  part,  "  awkward  or  untimely 
as  it  may  have  seemed,  has  been  quite  as  serious,  and 
intentionally  progressive,  as  Morgiana's  dance  round 
the  captain  of  the  Forty  Thieves."  "  If  I  took  off  the 
harlequin's  mask  for  a  moment,"  he  adds,  "you  would 


XIV.]  FORS  CLAVIGERA  187 

say  I  was  simply  mad."  This  is  in  the  main  true ;  but 
there  are  times,  especially  when  he  is  playing  with 
words  or  texts  of  Scripture,  in  which  inconsequence  is 
not  that  of  cool  reason. 

Let  us  pass  Letter  Lxxxii.  (September  1877),  which 
opens  with  a  reference  to  Baihfs  Magazine  and  a  story 
of  a  race-horse  and  his  kitten,  passes  to  Fielding,  "a 
truly  moral  novelist,"  worth  all  the  moderns  since 
Scott,  thence  to  the  question  of  Capital  Punishment, 
citing  a  long  extract  of  four  pages  from  Miiller's 
Dorians  J  a  propos  of  the  jolly  hanging  of  a  high- 
wayman with  much  strong  beer,  in  the  time  of 
George  lli.  Thence  to  the  "modern  philanthropist 
of  the  'Newgatory' school.''  Manchester  produces  no 
art,  no  literature,  but  has  taken  "to  steal  and  sell 
for  a  profit  the  waters  of  Thirlmere  and  clouds  of 
Helvellyn."  The  true  judgment  of  which  would  be 
not  that  the  Lake  of  Thirlmere  should  be  brought  to 
the  top  of  Manchester,  but  that  Manchester,  or  its 
Corporation,  should  be  put  at  the  bottom  of  the  Lake 
of  Thirlmere.  So  he  would  like  to  destroy  the  New 
Town  of  Edinburgh  and  the  city  of  New  York.  And 
this  is  serious.  He  did  not  jest  about  these,  and  he 
does  not  jest  about  Manchester ;  for  the  hills  and  vales 
of  England  are  the  "true  temples  of  God,  and  their 
waves  and  clouds  holier  than  the  dew  of  the  baptistery 
and  the  incense  of  the  altar."  The  Manchester  robbers 
should  take  note  of  Plato's  laws  forbidding  crimes 
against  the  gods.  And  there  follow  many  pages  from 
Plato's  Laws.  All  this,  we  ought  to  agree,  is  the  grim 
irony  of  a  poet  who  adores  the  beauty  of  Nature,  and 
is  maddened  to  extravagance  by  the  disfigurement  of 
Nature  by  modern  Industrialism. 


188  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

But  what  can  we  say  of  Letter  Lxxxvii.  (March 
1878)—"  The  Snow  Manger  '"' "?  And  it  must  be  noted 
that  this  87th  letter,  dated  March  1878,  was  written  on 
the  verge  of  one  of  those  terrible  attacks  which  in  the 
official  Life  is  described  as  "the  delirium  which  was 
now  the  chief  feature  of  his  disease  " — a  malady  which 
was  publicly  recorded  by  the  Proctor  in  Convocation 
at  Oxford,  and  for  which  prayers  for  his  recovery  were 
put  up  in  Italy.  AVhy  these  outpourings  of  his  troubled 
brain  should  be  finally  included  in  his  works  as  revised 
and  published  by  himself  and  his  friends,  is  a  question 
we  cannot  answer. 

It  is  a  far  pleasanter  duty  to  point  to  the  irrepres- 
sible playfulness,  that  Ariel-like — or  sometimes  Puck- 
like—  grace  in  which  serious  moral  and  spiritual 
thoughts  are  -wrapped.  In  Letter  vi.,  1st  June  1871, 
he  explained  the  scheme  of  these  papers  and  their 
"desultory  form,"  so  written,  he  says,  that  the  reader 
may  take  trouble.  The  price  (sevenpence)  is  that  of 
"two  pots  of  beer  twelve  times  in  the  year,"  -with 
postage.  It  has  cost  him  twenty  years  of  thought  and 
hard  reading  to  learn  what  he  has  to  say  in  these 
pamphlets.  They  cost  £10  to  print  per  1000,  and 
£5  for  a  picture.  A  thousand  sixpences  are  £25, 
which  leaves  £f>  for  the  author  and  £5  for  the  pub- 
lisher. This  is  cheap,  and  is  legitimate  business.  He 
can  only  write  about  the  things  he  cares  for,  and  as 
they  come  into  his  head.  For  instance,  he  has  just 
seen  the  Avild  hyacinths  in  the  glades  of  Bagley  Wood 
"opening  in  flakes  of  blue  fire,"  through  which  he 
slinks,  being  afraid  of  the  "gamekeeper  of  the  College 
of  the  gracious  Apostle  St.  John."  He  fears  that 
purchasers  "will  throw  my  letter,  even  though  it  has 


xiY.]  FORS  CLAVIGERA  189 

cost  you  sevenpence,  aside  at  once,  when  I  remark  to 
you  that  these  wood  hyacinths  of  Bagley  have  some- 
thing to  do  with  the  battle  of  Marathon,  and  if  you 
knew  it,  are  of  much  more  vital  interest  to  you  than 
even  the  Match  Tax." 

It  would  seem  that  inconsequence  could  not  go 
further,  unless  we  accept  the  "gunpowder  that  ran 
out  of  the  heels  of  their  boots";  but  it  is  presently 
explained,  that  the  wood  hyacinth  represents  the  Greek 
asphodel ;  that  the  asphodel  was  the  flower  of  the  Elysiau 
fields  in  which  the  heroes  slain  at  Marathon  went  to 
dwell ;  that  it  would  be  more  useful  for  English  work- 
men to  dwell  in  thought  upon  Marathon  and  all  it 
meant  and  on  the  Elysium,  or  Heaven,  to  which  they 
might  hope  to  go,  than  to  riot  about  Mr.  Lowe's  un- 
popular Match  Tax.  Theseus  made  lentil  soup  on 
the  shore  for  his  people  on  his  return  from  Crete, 
and  by  hoisting  a  black  sail,  led  his  father  to  commit 
suicide.  And  all  this  follows  from  the  wood  hyacinths 
of  Bagley,  near  Oxford ;  and  it  naturally  leads  on  to 
reflections  on  the  British  House  of  Commons  and  the 
terrible  conflagrations  in  Paris  in  May  1871. 

There  is  some  charming  harlequinade  of  the  kind  in 
Letter  xxiv.,  November  1872,  a  propos  of  Christmas. 
He  will  not  open  the  letter  with  "  My  friends,"  because 
he  is  in  no  friendly  mood,  and  gets  no  friendly  answer 
from  any  one.  Nor  -svill  he  sign  "Faithfully  yours" 
any  more,  for  he  is  not  faithfully  his  own,  and  finds 
other  people  far  from  faithfully  his.  Nor  will  he  sign 
his  name,  which  he  does  not  like,  for  it  is  only  short 
for  "Rough  Skin."  He  goes  on:  "^Vhen  I  got  to 
Oxford,  the  sky  was  entirely  clear;  the  Great  Bear 
was  near  the  ground  under  the  pole,  and  the  Charioteer 


190  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

higli  overhead,  the  principal  star  of  him  as  bright  as  a 
gas-lamp." 

"  It  is  a  curious  default  in  the  stars,  to  my  mind,  that  there 
15  a  Charioteer  among  them  without  a  chariot ;  and  a  Waggon 
with  no  waggoner ;  nor  any  waggon,  for  that  matter,  except 
the  Bear's  stomach  ;  but  I  have  always  wanted  to  know  the 
history  of  the  absent  Charles,  who  must  have  stopped,  I 
suppose  to  drink,  while  his  cart  went  on,  and  so  never  got 
stellified  himself.  I  wish  I  knew  ;  but  I  can  tell  you  less 
about  him  than  even  about  Theseus.  The  Charioteer's  story 
is  pretty  however — he  gave  his  life  for  a  kiss,  and  did  not  get  it ; 
got  made  into  stars  instead.  It  would  be  a  dainty  tale  to  tell 
you  under  the  mistletoe  ;  perhaps  I  may  have  time  next  year  ; 
to-day  it  is  of  the  stars  of  Ariadne's  crown  I  want  to  speak." 

And  thus  he  is  led  to  wonder  that  the  stories  of 
the  stars  are  all  Greek — not  Christian,  ignorant  or 
forgetful,  it  would  appear,  of  the  obvious  explanation 
that  the  Greeks  created  astronomical  science,  to  which 
the  mediaeval  monks  were  indiflferent.  An  old  lady 
dying,  bedridden,  left,  because  she  could  not  take  it 
with  her,  £200,000,  which  works  out  at  fourpence  a 
minute ;  so  that  she  awoke  in  the  morning  ten  pounds 
richer  than  she  w^ent  to  bed — at  which  "  the  stars,  with 
deep  amaze,  stood  fixed  Avith  steadfast  gaze,"  "  for  this 
is  a  Nativity  of  an  adverse  god  to  the  one  you  profess 
to  honour,  with  them  and  the  angels,  at  Christmas, 
by  over-eating  yourselves."  Over-eating  is  quite  an 
essential  part  of  the  Religion  of  Christmas,  and  is  about 
the  most  religious  thing  people  do  in  the  year.  \  It 
was  a  sore  question  with  Ruskin  himself  as  a  cmld 
that  he  lost  the  pleasure  of  four-sevenths  of  his  life, 
because  of  Sunday ;  for  "  a  lurid  shade  was  cast  over 
Friday  and  Saturday  by  the  horrible  sense  that  Sunday 
was  coming,  and  was  inevitable.'^   And  so  we  are  led 


XIV.]  FORS  CLA  VIGERA  191 

on  to  Dante's  ninth  circle  of  Holiness,  cold  dinners  on 
Sabbath,  and  this  leads  to  the  Crystal  Palace  enter- 
tainment on  Good  Friday,  and  this  to  the  lake  of 
Phlegethon,  described  in  the  Inferno,  and  this  to  Usury, 
and  the  Minotaur  of  Crete,  the  spirit  of  lust  and  anger. 
The  buying  an  illuminated  Koran  in  MSS.,  though  he 
could  not  read  it,  gave  him  exquisite  delight.  Then 
we  come  to  the  story  of  Theseus  and  his  return  from 
Crete — mthout  Ariadne.  His  vegetable  soup,  though, 
would  be  poor  Christmas  cheer. 

"Plum-pudding  is  an  Egyptian  dish;  but  have  you  ever 
thought  how  many  stories  were  connected  with  this  Athenian 
one,  pottage  of  lentils  ?  A  bargain  of  some  importance,  even 
to  us  (especially  as  usurers)  ;  and  the  healing  miracle  of 
Elisha  ;  and  the  vision  of  Habakkuk  as  he  was  bearing  their 
pottage  to  the  reapers,  and  had  to  take  it  far  away  to  one 
who  needed  it  more  ;  and,  chiefly  of  all,  the  soup  of  the  bitter 
herbs,  with  its  dipped  bread  and  faithful  company — '  he  it  is 
to  whom  I  shall  give  the  sop  when  I  have  dipped  it.'  The 
meaning  of  which  things,  roughly,  is,  first,  that  we  are  not  to 
sell  our  birthrights  for  pottage,  though  we  fast  to  death,  but 
are  diligently  to  know  and  keep  them  ;  secondly,  that  we  are 
to  poison  no  man's  pottage,  mental  or  real ;  lastly,  that  we  look 
to  it  lest  we  betray  the  hand  which  gives  us  our  daily  bread." 

Ruskin  here,  as  so  often,  seems  to  retain  a  belief  in 
the  symbolic  and  prophetic  phrases  of  Scripture,  when 
he  had  ceased  to  hold  any  belief  in  the  objective  facts 
that  the  Bible  records.  He  searched  it  diligently  still 
for  revelations  of  Divine  will,  or  for  a  kind  of  Sortes 
Virgilianae. 

The  Last  Supper  naturally  leads  him  to  quote  from 
the  Pall  Mall  the  last  supper  of  Annie  Redfern,  of 
Chicksand  Street,  Mile  End,  who  was  found  dead  of 
asphyxia,   as  the   inquest   proved,   from  li\ang   in  an 


192  JOHN  RUSKIN"  [chap. 

uuventilated  cellar.  The  same  newspaper  urges  that 
the  "career"  of  the  Madonna,  nursing  her  baby,  is 
too  limited,  and  that  Mr.  J.  Stuart  Mill  shows  English 
young  women  a  more  lucrative  occupation,  one  to 
which,  it  seems,  Annie  Redfern  succumbed.  The 
Athenians  kept  festival  in  memory  of  Theseus's  veget- 
able soup,  and  sang  a  beautiful  Easter  carol.  It  is  too 
bad  to  narcotise  babies  to  keep  them  quiet,  as  Mr.  Stuart 
Mill  and  modern  political  economy  encourage  mothers 
to  do  that  they  may  pursue  more  lucrative  occupations 
than  nursing.  Euskin's  mother  used  to  sing,  "  Hush- 
a-bye,  baby,  on  the  tree  top ! "  and  even  as  an  infant 
he  objected  to  the  bad  rhyme,  "^^^len  the  wind  blows, 
the  cradle  will  rock."  There  are  no  cradles  to  rock 
now,  and  we  shall  not  long  want  cradle  songs. 

Read  a  carol  of  Chaucer's,  but  Mr.  Mill  would  advise 
mothers  to  work,  not  to  sing.  In  old  pictures  of  the 
Nativity  doves  and  rabbits  are  shown  round  the  saints 
and  angels.  Nowadays  English  gentlemen  are  not 
happy  unless  they  are  massacring  rabbits  and  doves 
in  heaps. 

"  Of  course,  all  this  is  natural  to  a  sporting  people  who  have 
learned  to  like  the  smell  of  gunpowder,  sulphur,  and  gas-tar 
better  than  that  of  violets  and  thyme.  But,  putting  the  baby- 
poisoning,  pigeon-shooting,  and  rabbit-shooting  of  to-day  in 
comparison  with  the  pleasures  of  the  German  Madonna,  and 
her  simple  company,  and  of  Chaucer  and  his  carolling  com- 
pany :  and  seeing  that  the  present  effect  of  peace  upon  earth, 
and  well-pleasing  in  men,  is  that  every  nation  now  spends 
most  of  its  income  in  machinery  for  shooting  the  best  and 
bravest  men,  just  when  they  were  Ukely  to  have  become  of 
some  use  to  their  fathers  and  mothers,  I  put  it  to  you,  my 
friends  all,  calling  you  so,  I  suppose  for  the  last  time  (unless  you 
are  disposed  for  friendship  with  Herod  instead  of  Barabbas), 
whether  it  would  not  be  more  kind  and  less  expensive  to 


XIV.]  FORS  CLAVIGERA  193 

make  the  machinery  a  little  smaller,  and  adapt  it  to  spare 
opium  now,  and  expenses  of  maintenance  and  education  after- 
wards (besides  no  end  of  diplomacy),  by  taking  our  sport  in 
shooting  babies  instead  of  rabbits  ?  " 

Now,  all  this  is  not  mere  incoherent  raving.  The 
irony  is  not  more  fierce  and  continuous  than  in  Gulliver^ 
Candide,  or  Sartor ;  and  it  is  neither  gross  nor  crabbed. 
It  is  the  despairing  wail  of  one  who  from  infancy  has 
felt  a  passionate  love  of  all  things  beautiful  in  Nature 
and  in  Art  and  in  the  story  of  Man ;  who  loathes  the 
cruelty  of  war  and  the  wanton  torture  inflicted  on 
beautiful  and  tender  creatures  by  so-called  "Sport," 
the  mimic  of  war;  of  one  whose  soul  is  wrung  to 
madness  by  the  horrors,  physical,  moral,  aesthetic,  and 
spiritual  of  modern  Industrialism ;  lastly,  of  a  man, 
saturated,  more  than  any  priest,  mth  the  words  of 
Scripture  and  the  ideal  of  the  Gospel,  and  who  burns 
like  any  St.  Francis,  or  Zwingli,  or  Latimer,  to  make 
them  again  real  guides  to  living  men  on  earth.  Given 
the  spirit  of  a  Hot-gospeller  like  that,  fired  with  the 
irrepressible  CEstrus  of  the  author  of  Modern  Painters 
and  the  Seven  Lamps,  and  you  have  Fors  Clavigera,  with 
all  its  frenzy,  its  disorder  of  ideas,  its  noble  appeals, 
its  exquisite  tenderness  and  grace.  One  might  in 
fancy  imagine  some  "blessed  Glendoveer,'  some 
denizen  of  another  planet,  Mars  or  Mercury,  wherein 
the  "  Laws  of  Nature  "  as  we  know  them  do  not  obtain, 
and  where  society  is  cast  in  forms  we  call  "  Utopian," 
descending  on  our  earth.  Such  a  Martian  or  Mercurian, 
perfectly  ignorant  of  our  material  conditions,  sublimely 
disdainful  of  our  mean  and  squalid  life,  profoundly  dis- 
gusted Avith  our  barbarous  and  cruel  habits,  might 
deliver  his  soul  in  diatribes  not  wholly  unlike  those 

N 


194  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

of  Fors.     We  should  enjoy  the  hearing  him;  and  it 
would  do  us  good. 

If  we  fairly  judge  the  whole  series  of  Letters  in  Fors 

and  seek  to  understand  their  purport,  we  shall  find  a 

perfectly  definite  scheme  of  ideas  and  a  real  working 

aim.     With  a  mysterious  belief  in  the  creation  of  all 

Nature  and  living  creatures  by  a  loving  and  Almighty 

God,  whose   eye  watches   the  fall  of   every  sparrow 

and  the  opening  of  every  leaf,  mixed  with  an  equally 

active  belief  in  the  polytheistic,  or  fetichist,  sanctity  of 

natural  things  as  objects  of  worship  in  themselves,*, 

Euskin  had  brought  himself  to  regard  the  disfigure- \ 

ment  of  natural  things  and  the   slaughter  of  gentle  I 

creatures   as   desecration   and   sacrilege,   almost  as  a  ■ 

Hindoo  regards  the  slaughter  of  a  Brahminee  cow,  or  i 

a  Greek  would  regard  the  pollution  of  a  Fountain  of 

the  Nymphs.     Indignation  at  the  fraudulent  character 

of  so  much  in  modern  Trade  deepened  at  last  into  a 

judgment  upon  modern  Trade  itself  as  criminal  and 

degrading.     The  horrors  of  great  manufacturing  cities 

drove  him  to  declare  himself  a  violent  Communist, 

ready  to  accept  the  Social  Liquidation,  or  destruction 

of  modern  society  as  dreamed  by  Anarchists.      And 

yet,  his  early  training  in  Homer,   Scott,  Plato,  and 

Dante  disposed  him  towards  a  paternal  Autocracy  of 

the  Philosopher-King.     In  much  of  all  this  he  touched 

Carlyle,  Emerson,  William  Morris,  and  Tolstoi.     But 

it  must  always  be  remembered  that  Buskin  was  never 

a  political  revolutionist ;  he  was  a  spiritual  and  moral 

reformer — his  fiercest  imprecations  dying  away  into 

words  as  tender  as  those  of  Jesus  when  He  wept  at 

y sight  of  Jerusalem. 

^  For  the  yearning  towards  a  new  Society,  founded  on 


XIV.]  FORS  CLAVIGERA  195 

pure  Air,  Water,  and  Earth — on  Admiration,  Hope, 
and  Love,  for  the  desperate  and  visionary  attempt  to 
start  a  working  model  of  such  a  new  world,  we  may 
forget  the  many  follies  and  blunders  of  the  prophet  of 
Fors — his  incorrigible  misunderstanding  and  reviling 
of  such  men  as  Mill,  Spencer,  and  Comte ;  his  childish 
ignorance  of  facts  in  history,  language,  etymology,  and 
science ;  his  unfairness  to  friends,  and  his  insolence 
to  opponents  everywhere;  his  intense  arrogance  and 
absorption  in  a  sort  of  cocoon  of  egoism  of  his  own 
spinning.  Yes  !  for  his  great  heart  and  his  rare  brain 
were  from  infancy  warped  and  perverted  by  two  cruel 
influences — one  the  isolation  in  which  he  was  brought 
up  as  a  kind  of  Dalai  Lama,  veiled  from  touch  or  sight 
of  the  world  without;  the  other,  the  saturation  of 
mind  by  a  mystical  theology,  which  taught  him  to  treat 
all  things  as  absolutely  good,  or  absolutely  true^  or 
absolutely  evil,  or  absolutely  false,  in  a  world  where,  as 
Auguste  Comte  has  said,  all  things  are  relative^  in  a 
world  where  humanity  can  know  nothing  but  relative 
truths,  and  can  hope  for  nothing  but  relative  good. 

Euskin  has  often  been  called  a  follower  of  Carlyle, 
and  has  often  been  compared  to  Tolstoi.  He  claims 
likeness  himself  with  Swift,  and  he  has  certain  analo- 
gies with  Eousseau.  But  in  a  great  many  judgments 
of  history,  and  in  most  of  his  schemes  of  a  social  i 
Utopia,  he  has  reached  curious  coincidences  with  one  of' 
whom  he  knew  nothing,  and  of  whom  he  spoke  with 
abhorrence  and  contempt,  one  to  whom  in  habits  of 
mind  and  life  he  was  in  violent  contrast.  I  often  had 
occasion  to  remind  him,  in  public  and  in  private,  that 
most  of  his  social  doctrines  had  been  anticipated  by 
Auguste  Comte.     It  seems  a  paradox  to  mention  in 


196  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap.  xiv. 

the  same  sentence  the  most  systematic  and  the  most 
unsystematic  of  all  modern  writers,  the  most  scientific 
with  the  most  metaphysical,  the  philosopher  with  the 
poet,  the  most  organic  of  modern  thinkers  with  the 
most  anarchic.  Comte  had  never  heard  of  Ruskin, 
and  Ruskin  never  mentioned  Comte,  unless  in  some 
grotesque  parody  of  what  he  fancied  Comte  might 
have  said,  though  he  actually  had  said  the  contrary. 
The  fact  remains  that  Comte  and  Euskin  are  substan- 
tially agreed  in  their  view  of  Greek  poetry  and  religion, 
mediaeval  history,  Catholicism,  the  great  poets,  in  their 
honour  of  Dante,  of  Scott,  of  Gothic  architecture,  of 
Italian  art ;  and  also  in  their  disbelief  in  all  that  is 
offered  by  modern  Industrialism,  by  political  economy, 
by  the  emancipation  of  women,  by  democracy,  by 
parliamentarism,  by  the  dogmatism  of  scientific  hypo- 
theses. A  follower  of  Comte,  as  well  as  a  companion 
of  St.  George,  might  subscribe  to  the  famous  vows 
in  Letter  lviil,  mutatis  mutandis^  and  might  accept, 
with  the  same  reserves,  the  sixteen  aphorisms  in 
Letter  lxvii.  The  poetic,  sentimental,  metaphysical 
nephelococcygia  of  Fors  may  find  ample  analogies  and 
confirmation  in  the  systematic  science  and  the  historic 
religion  of  the  Positive  Polity, 


CHAPTEE    XV 


PRJETERITA 


The  last  work  of  Ruskin,  dated  from  his  early  home, 
May  1885,  in  his  sixty-seventh  year,  is  certainly  the 
most  charming  thing  that  he  ever  gave  to  the  world, 
and  is  one  of  the  most  pathetic  and  exquisite  Con- 
fessions in  the  language.  After  the  great  cerebral 
disturbance  of  1884  and  his  final  retirement  from 
Oxford,  his  friend.  Professor  Eliot  Norton,  suggested 
that  he  should  occupy  his  mind  with  jotting  down 
reminiscences  of  his  own  life,  at  least,  down  to  the 
crisis  of  1875  ;  and  this  he  began  to  do  at  intervals  of 
restored  activity.  These,  with  the  fragments  called 
Bileda,  are  now  collected  in  three  volumes,  and  were 
composed  at  odd  times  down  to  as  late  as  1889,  in 
Ruskin's  seventy-first  year. 

"  I  have  written  these  sketches,"  he  says,  "  frankly,  garru- 
lously, and  at  ease  " — and  indeed  nothing  more  naively  frank, 
more  sweetly  garrulous,  more  easy  to  read,  exists  in  our  lan- 
guage. "  I  write,"  he  goes  on,  "  on  my  father's  birthday  [his 
father  had  then  been  dead  twenty-one  years,  his  mother  also 
fourteen  years],  in  what  was  once  my  nursery  in  his  old 
house,  to  which  he  brought  my  mother  and  me,  sixty-two 
years  since,  I  being  then  four  years  old.  What  would  other- 
wise in  the  following  pages  have  been  Uttle  more  than  an  old 
man's  recreation  in  gathering  ^dsionary  flowers  in  fields  of 
youth,  has  taken,  as  I  wrote,  the  nobler  aspect  of  a  dutiful 

197 


198  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

oflFering  at  the  grave  of  parents  who  trained  my  childhood  to 
all  the  good  it  could  attain,  and  whose  memory  makes  declining 
life  cheerful  in  the  hope  of  being  soon  again  with  them." 

"I  am,  and  my  father  was  before  me,"  he  begins,  "a 
violent  Tory  of  the  old  school — Walter  Scott's  school, 
that  is  to  say,  and  Homer's — they  were  ni}^  own  two 
masters."  Scott's  novels,  he  says,  and  Pope's  Iliad 
w^ere  his  daily  readings,  as  a  child,  with  Eobinson  Crusoe 
and  the  Pilgrim's  Progress  on  Sundays.  Here  we  have 
the  germ  of  John  Euskin.  Greek  heroes,  myths,  kings, 
and  all  natural  objects  peopled  with  supernatural 
beings;  mediseval  chivalry,  knights,  ladies,  priests, 
yeomen,  and  burghers ;  the  solitary  castaway,  reduced 
to  primitive  simplicity  and  bare  life  in  a  cabin,  detached 
from  modern  civilisation ;  lastly,  the  mystical  theology 
of  Puritanism,  with  its  phantom  world  of  Biblical 
images  made  real  and  ever  present.  Cold  mutton,  he 
says,  on  Sundays  prevented  him  from  adopting  the 
career  his  mother  longed  for — that  of  an  evangelical 
clergyman.  He  did,  however,  end  in  being  something 
of  an  unattached  hedge-preacher,  with  a  Salvation 
Army  of  his  own  devising,  of  which  he  was  at  once  the 
director,  the  staff,  and  the  whole  congregation. 

I'rom  the  daily  reading  of  the  Bible  aloud  to  his 
mother,  continued  up  to  manhood,  he  learned,  he  says, 
much  of  his  general  power  of  taking  pains  and  the 
best  part  of  his  taste  in  literature.  Then  he  gives  us 
those  delightful  portraits  of  his  father,  mother,  aunts, 
cousins,  and  servants,  the  severe  schooling  of  his  child- 
hood, and  the  curious  habits  of  touring  about  the 
country  in  which  his  eyes  were  trained,  how  he  taught 
himself  to  read  and  write,  and  how  he  picked  up 
knowledge  of  plants,  minerals,  skies,  and  hills.     The 


XV.  ]  PRjE  TERITA  1 99 

story  of  the  Domecq  family,  and  of  the  hopeless  passion 
of  the  lad  for  Adele,  has  been  already  given  from  his 
own  memoir.  Nothing  is  more  delicious  than  the 
story  of  Anne,  his  nurse,  who  had  "a  natural  gift  for 
doing  disagreeable  things ;  above  all,  the  service  of  a 
sickroom;  so  that  she  was  never  quite  in  her  glory 
unless  some  of  us  were  ill."  She  had  an  equal  gift  for 
saying  disagreeable  things,  and  took  the  darkest  view 
of  any  subject,  before  seeking  to  mend  it,  so  that  old 
Mrs.  Ruskin  would  say,  gravely,  that  if  ever  a  woman 
in  this  world  were  possessed  by  the  Devil,  Anne  was 
that  woman.  And  note  the  companion  portrait  of  old 
Mause,  the  very  type  of  Mause  Headrigg,  who  was 
shocked  to  see  some  crumbs  thrown  out  of  window, 
and  would  dine  on  potato  skins,  to  give  her  own  dinner 
away  to  a  poor  person.  Young  John  remembered  in  her 
the  Scottish  Puritan  spirit  in  its  perfect  faith  and  force, 
giving  to  it  "the  reverence  and  honour  it  deserves." 

How  racy  is  the  story  of  the  travelling  carriages  and 
their  tours  in  England  and  on  the  continent !  First,  it 
was  the  old  chariot,  with  its  "dickey"  for  the  nurse 
and  boy,  wherein  they  visited  almost  all  that  was  best 
worth  seeing  in  England.  Then  it  grew  into  the 
luxurious  travelling  carriage  of  foreign  tours,  with  all 
its  conveniences  and  charms.  Those  of  us  who  can 
remember  the  vetturino  of  the  Alps,  Italy,  or  the  Riviera, 
have  memories  which  the  globe-trotter  of  to-day  cannot 
recall ;  and  some  day  hereafter,  when  all  locomotion  is 
performed  by  electricity  or  in  balloons,  these  garrulous 
pages  of  Ruskin's  memoirs  will  have  a  rare  savour : — 

"  The  poor  modern  slaves  and  simpletons  who  let  themselves 
be  dragged  like  cattle,  or  felled  timber,  through  the  countries 
they  imagine   themselves  visiting,   can  have   no  conception 


200  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

whatever  of  the  complex  joys,  the  ingenious  hopes,  connected 
with  the  choice  and  arrangement  of  the  travelling  carriage  in 
old  times — the  little  apartment  which  was  to  be  one's  home 
for  five  or  six  months." 

The  British  tourist  in  charge  of  Mr.  Cook  may 
envy  or  despise  the  story  of  the  spacious  mttura  that 
sheltered  six  persons  and  was  drawn  by  four  stout 
trotters,  the  postillions,  the  courier,  the  inns  advised 
of  company  beforehand,  the  "change  of  horses,"  the 
fifty  miles  a  day  of  journey,  the  morning  and  the 
evening  rest,  and  stroll  round  village,  or  to  castle  or 
church.  And  then  after  the  long  daily  "trek"  from 
Calais,  and  through  the  Black  Forest,  to  Schaffhausen, 
there  burst  on  the  lad,  like  a  vision  of  heaven,  the 
first  view  of  the  snowy  Alps — "  clear  as  crystal,  sharp 
on  the  pure  horizon  sky,  and  already  tinged  with  rose 
by  the  sinking  sun."  The  sight  was  a  revelation  to 
the  young  genius — a  "  call,"  a  destiny. 

"I  went  down  that  evening  from  the  garden  terrace  of 
Schaifhausen  with  my  destiny  fixed  in  all  of  it  that  was  to 
be  sacred  and  useful.  To  that  terrace,  and  the  shore  of  the 
Lake  of  Geneva,  my  heart  and  faith  return  to  this  day,  in 
every  impulse  that  is  yet  nobly  alive  in  them,  and  every 
thought  that  has  in  it  help  or  peace." 

The  record  of  these  early  tours,  of  his  home  in 
Surrey,  and  his  visits  to  the  Lakes  and  the  Highlands, 
is  an  ample  explanation  of  the  formation  of  his  powers ; 
of  what  Mazzini  called  "the  most  analytic  mind  in 
Europe";  what  Euskin  himself  very  justly  claims  to 
have — "  patience  in  looking  and  precision  in  feeling — 
a  thirst  for  A^sible  fact  at  once  so  eao:er  and  so 
methodic."  That  is  a  true  bit  of  self- vivisection.  And 
so,  too,  is  the  confession  that  Don  Quixote,  over  which, 


XV.]  PEjETERITA  201 

as  a  boy,  lie  could  laugh  to  ecstasy,  is  now  become 
"one  of  the  saddest  and,  in  some  things,  the  most 
offensive  of  books  to  me."  Alas!  there  was  in  John 
Kuskin  a  strain  of  the  Knight  of  La  Mancha,  and  he, 
too,  had  to  learn  that  in  this  world  and  in  our  age 
knight-errantry  however  chivalrous  in  spirit,  mediaeval 
romance  however  beautiful  as  poetry,  will  not  avail 
to  reform  the  world  ^vith  nothing  but  a  rusty  lance 
and  a  spavined  charger.  It  is  magnificent,  it  may  be 
war ;  but  it  is  not  a  real  social  philosophy,  nor  is  it  a 
possible  religion. 

He  seems  to  see  something  of  this  himself,  at  least 
he  lets  us  see  it  through  his  sighs  and  groans  over  the 
mistakes  made  in  his  early  training,  in  his  isolation 
from  all  fatigues,  risks,  companions,  and  pain,  so  that 
boys  looked  on  him  as  an  innocent  and  treated  him 
as  a  girl;  for  "the  fountain  of  pure  conceit"  in  his 
own  heart  sustained  him  against  chaff.  If  only,  he 
says,  his  parents  had  given  him  a  shaggy  scrap  of  a 
Welsh  pony,  and  left  him  in  charge  of  a  Welsh  guide 
and  his  wife  instead  of  coddling  him  at  home,  "the}^ 
would  have  made  a  man  of  me  there  and  then."  And 
this  leads  to  his  delicious  story  of  the  efforts  made  to 
teach  him  to  ride  in  a  riding-school  in  Moorfields,  and 
how  he  would  fall  off  when  he  turned  a  corner,  till  at 
last  his  fond  parents  gave  up  that  part  of  his  educa- 
tion, consoling  themselves  with  the  thought  that  "his 
not  being  able  to  learn  to  ride  was  the  sign  of  his  being 
a  singular  genius." 

Delightfully  naive,  too,  is  the  story  of  how  John 
James  wooed  Margaret  Cox  "with  the  same  kind  of 
serenity  and  decision  ^vith  which  afterwards  he  chose 
his  clerks " ;  how  they  waited  nine  years,  and  then 


202  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

"  were  married  in  Perth  one  evening  after  supper,  the 
servants  of  the  house  having  no  suspicion  of  the  event 
until  John  and  Margaret  drove  away  together  next 
morning  to  Edinburgh."  John  James  was  certainly 
more  deliberate  in  love  than  his  mercurial  son — and 
also  more  constant.  We  have  already  seen  how  the 
son,  at  the  age  of  sixty-six,  looked  back  on  his  own 
first  love  at  seventeen. 

"  I  had  neither  the  resolution  to  win  Adele,  the  courage  to 
do  without  her,  the  sense  to  consider  what  was  at  last  to  come 
of  it  all,  or  the  grace  to  think  how  disagreeable  I  was  making 
myself  at  the  time  to  everybody  about  me.  There  was  really 
no  more  capacity  nor  intelligence  in  me  than  in  a  just  fledged 
owlet,  or  just  open-eyed  puppy,  disconsolate  at  the  existence 
of  the  moon." 

We  have  seen,  too,  how  he  describes  his  matricula- 
tion at  Christ  Church,  and  how  he  disappointed  the 
hopes  of  his  fond  parent  that  he  should  "  take  all  the 
prizes  every  year,  and  a  double  first  to  finish  with; 
marry  Lady  Clara  Vere  de  Vere;  write  poetry  as 
good  as  Byron's,  only  pious ;  preach  sermons  as  good  as 
Bossuet's,  only  Protestant ;  be  made,  at  forty,  Bishop 
I  of  Winchester,  and,  at  fifty,  Primate  of  England." 
'There  was  no  fear  of  his  gambling,  for  he  looked  on 
dice  as  people  look  on  dynamite.  No  fear  of  the 
strange  woman,  for  he  was  in  love,  and  never  out  after 
half-past  nine.  No  fear  of  debt,  for  there  were  no 
Turners  to  be  had  in  Oxford,  and  he  cared  for  no 
other  possession.  No  fear  of  a  fall  out  hunting,  for 
he  could  not  sit  a  hack.  No  fear  of  ruining  himself  at 
races,  for  he  had  no  wish  to  win  anybody's  money. 
Besides,  he  had  to  go  to  tea  every  evening  with  his 
mother. 


XV.]  PRETERIT  A  203 

Nothing  in  Prceterita  is  more  fascinating  and  also 
illuminating  than  the  author's  description  of  his  own 
passion  for  nature.  "  I  had,  in  my  little  clay  pitcher, 
vialfuls,  as  it  were,  of  AVordsworth's  reverence,  Shelley's 
sensitiveness.  Turner's  accuracy,  all  in  one.  A  snow- 
drop was  to  me,  as  to  Wordsworth,  part  of  the  Sermon 
on  the  Mount ;  but  I  never  should  have  ^vritten  sonnets 
to  the  celandine,  because  it  is  of  coarse  yellow  and 
imperfect  form.  With  Shelley,  I  loved  blue  sky  and 
blue  eyes,  but  never  in  the  least  confused  the  heavens 
with  my  own  little  Psychidion.  ...  I  did  not  weary 
myself  in  wishing  that  a  daisy  could  see  the  beauty 
of  its  shadow,  but  in  trying  to  draw  the  shadow 
rightly  myself." 

"Nobody,"  he  says  in  1839,  "cared  for  Turner  but 

the  retired  coachmaker  of  Tottenham  and  I."     I  can 

only  say,  for  myself,  that  in  the  earliest  forties  I  had 

been  trained  by  my  father  to  admire  Turner,  and  used 

to  be  taken  every  May  to  admire  them  in  Trafalgar 

Square.     One   of  the  paradoxes  of  Ruskin's  mind  is 

the  indifference  he  felt  towards  Italy  and  Italian  art 

as  a  youth.     He  was  taken  to  Florence  and  Rome  from 

Oxford  in   1840,  in  his  twenty-second  year;  and  he 

says,  quite  truly,  that  he  was  "in  total  ignorance  of 

what  early  Christian  art  meant."     He  felt  "grievous 

disappointment"  in  Florence;  all  sacred  art  was   "a 

mere    zero";    and    the   Tribune    of    the   Uffizi    "an 

unbecoming    medley,    got    together    by   people    who 

knew  nothing,  and  cared  less  than  nothing,  about  the 

arts."     As  they  reached  Rome  the  Calvinist  parents 

observed  with  triumph  that  the  "nearer  to  Rome  the 

road  got  worse."    The  Forum,  St.  Peter's,  the  Coliseum, 

the   Capitol,  were   all   equally   "uninteresting."    The 


204  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

" Transfiguration "  of  Eaphael  was  an  "ugly"  picture. 
The  "Stanze"  could  give  nobody  any  pleasure.  He 
was  again  "  disappointed  "  with  Naples  and  everything 
around  it.  To  us  in  the  twentieth  century  it  seems 
incredible  that  sixty  years  ago  a  young  man  of  real 
genius  for  art,  who  had  studied  art,  and  had  written 
on  art  from  childhood,  could  have  been  in  such  a  state 
of  callous  ignorance  on  his  first  visit  to  Italy.  But 
we  may  remember  all  the  changes  of  view  that,  in 
these  sixty  years,  Modern  Painters  and  the  Seven  Lamps 
have  produced  on  us.  We  may  remember  also  that 
John  was  in  bad  health — sent  abroad  to  save  his  life. 
He  tells  us  that  Rome  was  the  very  worst  place  he 
could  have  been  sent  to;  and  that  he  was,  all  that 
time,  "  simply  a  little  floppy  and  soppy  tadpole." 

Return  to  the  Alps,  the  glaciers  and  lakes  of 
Switzerland  restored  health  to  the  wearied  brain  and 
delicate  frame.  It  is  a  wonderful  story  of  the  mira- 
culous efi'ect  on  Ruskin  of  mountains,  as  he  tells  us  in 
Prceterita — a  story  worth  the  attention  of  psychologists 
and  physicians.  Some  of  his  most  exquisite  word- 
pictures  of  scenery  are  to  be  found  in  these  volumes ; 
often  extracted  from  his  diary  at  the  time,  and  intended 
for  no  eye  but  his  own ;  such  as  the  grand  view  from 
the  D61e— from  the  Col  de  la  Faucille  {Pnet.  i.  193). 
I  saw  it  myself  at  sunrise  in  1851,  on  one  of  the  most 
magnificent  crimson  morning  skies  before  storm  that 
ever  eye  beheld.  Another  wonderful  bit  is  of  the 
Rhone  below  Geneva  {Pnvt.  ii.  90),  one  of  the  most 
superb  pictures  that  Ruskin  ever  drew  in  prose,  or 
again  the  glacier  torrent  of  the  Triolet  (Prcet.  ii.  221). 
An  interesting  record  for  us  is  that  in  1849  (cetai. 
thirty)  it  was  the  sight  of  the  hard  lot  of  the  Alpine 


XV.]  PR^^TERITA  205 

peasant  which  first  turned  him  to  meditate  on  the 
social  question  — was  the  origin  of  the  design  of  St. 
George's  Guild,  "closed  his  days  of  youthful  happi- 
ness, and  began  his  true  work  in  the  world — for  what 
it  is  worth." 

Prceterita  gives  us,  with  Fors,  a  complete  account  of 
the  gradual  development  of  religious  thought  in 
Ruskin's  mind.  Brought  up  a  strict  Evangelical  and 
Biblical  Christian  from  childhood,  he  retained  belief 
in  that  faith  till  manhood,  though  it  is  clear  that  he 
did  not  feel  for  it  deep  and  spiritual  sympathy.  His 
long  studies  of  foreign  people  and  of  mediaeval  art 
gradually  weaned  him  from  Evangelical  views ;  and  as  he 
says  in  1845  (a3tat.  twenty-six),  they  were  being  replaced 
by  m.ore  Catholic  sympathies.  "Why  did  I  not 
become  a  Catholic  then  1 "  he  asks ;  and  replies,  "  Why 
did  I  not  become  a  Fire-worshipper  1 " — loving  the  sun 
so  much.  He  tells  us  that  his  visit  to  Italy  in  1858  {cetat. 
thirty-seven)  marked  his  "  final  apostasy  from  Puritan 
doctrine."  Intimacy  with  Carlyle,  Froude,  and  others 
led  him  to  very  latitudinarian  views  of  all  dogmatic 
theology,  without  impairing  his  intense  hold  on  the 
conception  of  God's  Providence  and  the  spiritual 
meaning  of  Scripture.  The  tragedy  of  his  life — 
repudiation  by  Eose  La  Touche  and  her  death — 
turned  him  back  to  a  more  definitely  Christian  con- 
dition, and  in  this  mood  the  last  twenty  years  of  his 
fast-ebbing  life  were  passed,  wholly  detached  from 
any  formal  church  or  doctrinal  school.  A  passage  in 
Prceterita  (iii.  7)  well  expresses  the  root  religion  of 
his  life— 

"  While  these  convictions  [condemnation  of  all  forms  of 
monasticism]  prevented  me  from  being  ever  led  into  accept- 


206  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap.  xv. 

ance  of  Catholic  teaching  by  my  reverence  for  the  Catholic 
art  of  the  great  ages, — and  the  less,  because  the  Catholic  art  of 
these  small  ages  can  say  but  little  for  itself, — I  grew  also  daily 
more  sure  that  the  peace  of  God  rested  on  all  the  dutiful  andj 
kindly  hearts  of  the  laborious  poor  ;  and  that  the  only  constant! 
form  of  f)ure  religion  was  in  useful  work,  faithful  love,  andl 
stintless  charity." 

Well  1    that    is    the    essence    of    the    religion    of 
Humanity. 


CHAPTEE   XVI 

LAST  DAYS 

The  last  ten  years  of  Kuskin's  long  life  (1889-1899) 
were  passed  in  close  retirement  and  in  complete 
rest,  broken  only  by  a  rare  visit  from  an  intimate,  a 
few  words  about  his  publications  and  the  works  of 
others,  and  from  time  to  time  the  loss  of  a  dear  friend. 
He  enjoyed  life,  could  walk,  play  chess,  listen  to  a 
reading,  turn  over  the  pages  of  a  book  he  loved,  suck 
up  the  fragrance  of  his  roses,  and  gaze  wistfully  across 
the  lake  at  the  Coniston  Old  Man.  Slowly  his  strength 
ebbed  away  without  suffering  or  illness,  till  at  last  he 
became  an  invalid  in  a  Bath  chair,  passing  most  of  his 
time  in  his  bedroom  and  study,  with  but  the  company 
of  one  or  other  of  the  Severn  family,  who  watched 
over  him  with  tender  care. 

His  eightieth  birthday  (8th  February  1899)  was 
celebrated  with  a  shower  of  letters,  telegrams,  addresses, 
flowers,  and  gifts  from  all  parts  of  the  country,  and 
even  of  the  world.  The  greet  address,  illuminated  on 
vellum,  signed  by  the  Prince  of  Wales  and  a  crowd 
of  official  personages,  was  presented  by  a  deputation. 
The  University  of  Oxford,  the  London  Ruskin  Society, 
the  Coniston  Parish  Council,  sent  similar  addresses; 
private  friends  poured  in  their  congratulations,  and 
the  press  joined  in  with  hearty  sympathy,     One  night 

207 


208  JOHN  RUSKIN  [chap. 

he  stood  looking  at  the  portrait  of  Sir  Edward  Burne- 
Jones,  and  gazing,  said,  "  That 's  my  dear  brother  Ned." 
Next  day  the  artist  died,  and  this  was  the  worst  blow  the 
old  man  had  to  bear.  All  that  autumn  and  winter  he 
remained  very  feeble,  but  clear  in  mind,  and  at  peace. 

In  January  1900  influenza  raged  in  Coniston,  and 
at  last  reached  Brantwood.  On  18th  January  he  was 
seized,  rallied  next  day,  but  on  the  20th  the  heart 
failed,  and  he  sank  softly  asleep  surrounded  by  his 
dear  ones,  in  the  room  hung  round  with  his  beloved 
Turners.  Without  a  word  or  a  struggle  he  had  passed 
into  his  last  sleep.  He  died  within  two  weeks  of  his 
eighty-first  birthday.  The  world  at  large,  the  world  of 
letters,  the  press,  and  the  many  Societies  connected 
with  his  name  and  work,  sounded  his  praises  and 
rehearsed  his  good  deeds  in  words  that  were  fit,  but 
somewhat  too  late. 

By  his  own  express  desire,  the  family  caused  him  to 
be  buried  in  Coniston  Churchyard,  and  they  declined 
the  offer  of  a  grave  in  Westminster  Abbey.  A  bronze 
medallion,  by  OnsloAr  Ford,  R.A.,  was  raised  there  by 
a  large  body  of  his  friends  and  admirers,  and  a  place 
chosen  for  it  in  Poets'  Corner  in  the  Abbey,  close 
beside  the  bust  of  Walter  Scott.  It  was  unveiled  by 
Mrs.  Severn  on  his  birthday,  8th  February  1902. 
With  a  simple  village  funeral,  and  with  a  gathering 
of  relations  and  intimates,  he  was  laid  in  a  grave 
beside  his  old  friends,  the  Beevers,  beneath  a  fir  tree, 
close  to  the  children's  school.  The  only  unusual 
feature  in  the  burial  was  the  presence  of  rich  colours, 
and  the  absence  of  all  black,  which  he  so  hated  even  in 
mourning.  The  pall  upon  his  coffin  was  of  bright 
crimson    silk,    embroidered    with    his    favourite    wild 


XVI.]  LAST  DAYS  209 

roses  on  a  grey  field,  and  inscribed  with  the  motto, 
Unto  this  Last.  The  chancel  was  filled  with  wreaths, 
white,  green,  and  violet ;  and  foremost  of  all  was  the 
great  cross  laid  there  by  his  cousin,  Joan  Severn,  con- 
sisting of  the  red  roses  he  loved. 

"There  was  no  black  about  his  burying,  except  what 
we  wore  for  our  own  sorrow,"  says  his  friend,  secretary, 
and  biographer,  who  has  left  so  fine  a  tribute,  in  the 
Life,  to  the  memory  of  his  master. 

Let  there  be  no  black  about  our  memory  of  him,  say 
all  of  us  who  love  a  beautiful  nature  and  honour  a  rare 


INDEX 


Abailard,  138. 
Acland,  Sir  H.,  34. 

Sir  T.  D.,  167. 

Adair,  family,  4. 
Agnew,  family,  4,  110. 

Joan,  see  Mrs.  Severn. 

Alexander,  Miss,  148. 

Alice  in  Wmiderland,  116. 

Allen.  G.,  85,  164,  168. 

AUingham,  Mrs.,  148. 

Alps,  the,  15,  38,  41,  45,  52,  204. 

Andrews,  Dr.,  15. 

Angelico,  Fra,  47,  51,  76,  118. 

Anne,  nurse,  11,  195. 

Aquinas,  103. 

Aratra  Fentelici,  124. 

Arena  Chapel,  81. 

Arethusa,  125. 

Ariadne,  190. 

Ariadne  Florentina^  129. 

Aristotle,  42,  103,  128. 

Arnold,  Matthew,  19. 

Art  of  England,  142-144. 

Arundel  Society,  81. 

Assisi,  156. 

Athens,  81,  82. 


Bacon,  Roger,  138. 

Francis,  43. 

Baily's  Magatine,  187. 
Bardoux,  Jacques,  61,  153,  155. 
Beever,  Misses,  208. 


Bentham,  103. 

Bernard,  St.,  131. 

Be^vick,  129. 

Bible,  9,  13,  101,  103,  198. 

Bihliotheca  Pastortim,  140. 

Birds,  131. 

Blackioood's  MagazinCy  26. 

Blake,  128. 

Boss\iet,  59. 

Botticelli,  47,  129,  145,  146. 

Boxall,  R.  A.,  49. 

Bradford,  116. 

Brantwood,  120,  158,  163,  207. 

Bright,  John,  94. 

Bronte,  Charlotte,  69. 

Brown,  Dr.  Thomas,  6. 

John,  180. 

Browning,  Robert  and  Mrs.,  88,  94. 

Buckland,  Dr.,  34. 

Buckle,  73. 

Bunyan,  9,  198. 

Burgess,  A.,  164. 

Burne-Jones,  80,  85,  144,  160,  208. 

Byron,  9,  22,  23,  34,  63,  88. 

Byzantine  Art,  m,  70,  71,  81,  134. 


Calais,  23,  52,  200. 

Calvinism,  55,  101,  106. 

Cambridge,  89, 119,  165. 

Canaletto,  42. 

Carlyle,  T.,  4,  43,  58,  69,  72,  76,  84, 

88,  96,  101,  112,  127,  132,  153, 

167,  194,  205. 

2U 


212 


JOHN  RUSKIN. 


Carpaccio,  131,  156. 

Cervantes,  Don  Quixote,  9,  96,  200. 

Chamberlain,  Mr.  J.,  107. 

Chancer,  128,  131,  192. 

Christ  Church,  16,  34,  35,  UO. 

Christmas,  190. 

Claude,  42. 

Collingwood,  Mr.  W.  G.,  78,  138, 

153,  162,  169,  179,  182,  209. 
Comte,   Augnste,  65,   73,  99,  101, 

112,  195. 
Coniston,  158.  163,  207. 
Constantinople,  81. 
Cook,  Mr.  E.  T.,  122,  138, 142, 153, 

155,  165,  177. 
Cornhill  Magazine,  91, 
Corpus  Christi  College,  140. 
Correggio,  146. 
Couttet,  45,  56,  153. 
Cox,  Margaret,  5,  7,  8,  and  see  Mrs. 

J.  J.  Ruskin. 

Family,  5,  7. 

Cruikshank,  G.,  39. 


Dale,  Eev.  T.,  15. 

Dandolo,  Doge,  75. 

Dante,  47,  81,  89, 134,  170, 176,  191. 

Darwin,  C,  34,  143. 

Daubeny,  Dr.,  34. 

Davy,  Lady,  54,  78. 

Defoe,  9,  198. 

Democracy,  77. 

Denmark  Hill,  3,  45,  57,  92,  110. 

Deucalion,  158. 

Dicey,  Professor  A. ,  84. 

Dickens,  96,  163. 

Dilecta,  197. 

Dole,  204. 

Domecq  family,  6,  30-33. 

Adele,  30,  33,  202. 

Dublin,  113. 
Diirer,  A.,  129. 


Eagle's  Nest,  The,  127. 
Early  Lessons,  11, 
Edinburgh,  3,  5,  28,  83,  187. 
Edinburgh    Philosophical    Institu- 
tion, 83. 
Edinburgh  Mevieiv,  1. 
Elements  of  Drawing,  86. 
Eliot,  George,  112. 
Emerson,  113,  194. 
Ethics  of  the  Dust,  116. 
Etna,  22. 

Endosia,  a  poem,  12. 
Eyre,  Governor,  119. 


Fesole,  Laws  of,  167. 

Fielding,  Copley,  39,  148. 

Florence,  47,  61,  129,  203. 

Forbes,  Professor,  46, 

Ford,  Onslow,  R.A.,208. 

Fors  Clavigera,  166,  181-196. 

Forster,  W.  E.,  107. 

Fox,  G.,  105. 

Francis,   St.,    105,    132,   156,   177, 

193. 
Eraser's  Magazine,  101. 
Friendship's  Offering,  23,  25. 
Froude,  J.  A.,  101,  205. 
Furnivall,  Dr.,  84,  92. 


Gainsborough,  146. 

Gambetta,  94. 

Garibaldi,  94. 

George,  St.,  Company  of,  166,  170- 

178,  196. 
Ghirlandajo,  47. 
Giotto,  61,  81,  82,  90. 
Gladstone,  Mr.,  54,  93. 
Glenfarg,  21. 
Goethe,  128. 
Gordon,  Osborne,  36. 


INDEX. 


213 


Gothic  art,  59,  65,  135, 145. 
Gozzoli,  Benozzo,  131. 
Gray  family,  56. 

E.  C,  56,  57,  78. 

Greenawav,  Kate,  148. 

Greek  Art,  66,  113,  118,  126,  134, 

135,  165. 
Greek  Poetry,  113,  124,  128. 

H 

Haeckel,  Dr.,  143. 

Harbours  of  England,  87. 

Harding,  39,  49. 

Headrigg,  Mause,  199. 

Heme  Hill,  10,  30,  40,  45,  83,  197. 

Herod,  53,  158. 

Hill,  Miss  Octavia,  166,  167. 

Hinksey,  Road  of,  141. 

Holbein,  129,  130,  146. 

Hollyer,  Photograph  by,  93. 

Hoiner,  9,  13,  128. 

Hooker,  51. 

Houghton,  Lord,  78. 

Hughes,  T.,  84. 

Hugo,  v.,  94,  134. 

Hume,  103,  113. 

Hunt,  Holman,  80,  84,  85,  143. 

W.,  160. 

Huxley,  Professor,  143. 


Ilaria  di  Caretto,  47. 
Ingram,  Professor,  9 
Iteriad,  The,  22. 


Jamaica  Committee,  119. 
Jameson,  Mrs.,  49. 
Jeffery,  W.,164. 
Jephson,  Dr. ,  36,  55. 
Jesuits,  105,  177. 
Joy  for  Ever,  89,  164. 


K 

Kant,  103. 

Kempis,  A,  161. 

King  of  the  Golden  River,  78. 

King's  College,  London,  16. 

Kingsley,  84,  96,  112. 

Knox,  John,  4. 


Latimer,  193. 
Leech,  John,  148. 
Leibnitz,  103. 
Leigh  ton,  SirF.,  145. 
Leonardo,  81. 
Liddell,  Dean,  34. 
Lindsay,  Lord,  47,  54. 
Lippi,  47. 
Locke,  John,  43. 
Lockhart,  54. 

Charlotte,  54,  55. 

Loudon,  28. 

Loudon's  Architectural  Magazine ^ 

27. 
Loudon's  Magazine,  25. 
Love's  Meinie,  131. 
Lowe,  Robert,  35,  189. 
Lubbock,  Sir  J.,  84,  112. 
Luca  della  Robbia,  146. 
Lucca,  47. 

M 

Macaulay,  113. 

M'Culloch,  97. 

Macdonald,  M.,  55. 

Macugnaga,  47. 

Mallock,  W.  H.,  123,  138. 

Malthusians,  105. 

Manchester,  164,  187. 

Mantegna,  129. 

Marathon,  189. 

Mark's,  St.,  75. 

Marks,  Stacy,  146. 

Marriage  of  Ruskin's  parents,  7. 


214 


JOHN  RUSKIN. 


Marriage  of  J,  Ruskin,  55-57. 

Marshall,  family,  78. 

Maurice,  Rev.  F.  D.,  78,  84,  86,  96. 

Maurier,  Du,  148. 

Mazzini,  94,  200. 

Meissonier,  141. 

Melos,  125. 

Michael  Augelo,  81,  129. 

Michelet,  Jules,  131. 

Milan,  46. 

Mill,  J.  S.,  73,  96.  100,  134,  192, 

195. 
Millais,  Sir  J.  E.,  57,  80,  141. 

Lady,  57. 

Milton,  59. 

Mitford,  Miss,  54. 

Modern  Painters,  1,  41-51. 

More,  SirT.,  176. 

Morris,  W.,  85,  194. 

Mount  Temple,  Lord,  78,  167. 

Miiller,  Dorians,  187. 

Mulready,  R.  A.,  129. 

Munera  Fulveris,  101. 

Murillo,  76. 

Murray,  John,  54. 

Museum,  Oxford,  89,  138,  139. 

N 

Naples,  204. 
New  York,  187. 
Newdigate  Poem,  24,  35. 
Newton  Hall,  85. 

SirC,  34,  80. 

Niccola  Pisano,  134,  145. 
Northcote,  R.  A.,  11,  159. 
Norton,  C.  Eliot,  114,  197. 
Notes  on  the  Pictures  of  the  Year, 
88. 

0 

Olive,  Crown  of  Wild,  64, 116. 
Oxford,  16,  24,  33-37,  89,  121-150, 
160,  166,  202. 


Padua,  81. 

Pantheon,  66. 

Paris,  46,  166. 

Parthenon,  66,  129,  145. 

Passmore  Edwards,  85. 

Patmore,  Coventry,  88. 

Paul's,  St.,  66,  125. 

Paxton,  Sir  J.,  68. 

Perugino,  145. 

Pheidias,  126,  145. 

Pisa,  46,  47. 

Plato,  43,  94,  103,  144,  176,  187. 

Pleasures  of  England,  142. 

Pollajuolo,  Antonio,  131, 

Pompeii,  145. 

Pope,  A. ,  9,  22. 

Poussin,  42. 

Prmterita,  1,  4,  8,  10,  15,  17,  33, 

87,  49,  197-206. 
Praxiteles,  125. 
Pre-Raphaelitism,  80. 
Proserjnna,  158. 
Prout,  42,  80,  160. 


Q 


}ueen  of  the  Air,  117. 


R 


Raphael,  126,  131,  159.  204. 
Rede  Lecture,  119. 
Renascence,  66,  130,  148. 
Reynolds,  Sir  J.,  118,  131,  146. 
Ricardo,  96,  97,  101. 
Richard  Coeur  de  Lion,  175. 
Richmond,  George,  36,  41,  92. 

William,  Sir,  121,  145,  16C. 

Robson,  148. 
Rogers,  44,  69,  78. 
Rogers'  Italy,  39. 
Roman  Art,  66. 
Rome,  36,  63,  203. 


INDEX. 


215 


Rose  La  Touche,  112,  154-156,  205. 

Rose,  Romance  of  the,  131. 

Ross,  family,  4. 

Rossetti,  D.  G.,  80,  85,  90,  143, 
144,  165. 

Rousseau,  17,  43,  165,  176,  194. 

Rowbotham,  15. 

Rubens,  76,  145. 

Runciman,  Mr.,  15. 

Ruskin,  John,  born,  7  ;  infancy,  9  ; 
first  sermon,  11 ;  first  poems,  14 ; 
early  travels,  10,  14,  15,  16 ; 
schools,  15-17;  Ulnesses,  17,  33, 
151-158,  160,  188;  poetry,  19, 
20-24;  Rata  Phusin,  27,  2S ; 
vetturino  travelling,  199 ;  first 
love,  30-33;  last  love,  154-156, 
205;  at  Oxford,  33-37;  degree, 
36  ;  religious  views,  12,  49,  71, 72, 
205 ;  Oxford  professor,  121-161 ; 
arms  of,  50 ;  marriage,  55-57  ;  por- 
trait of,  92-96  ;  last  days,  207-209; 
eightieth  birthday,  207 ;  burial, 
208  ;  memorial  medallion  placed 
in  Poets'  Corner,  Westminster 
Abbey,  208. 

Ruskin,  John  James,  father,  3,  6, 
7.  9,  12,  33,  45,  83,  95,  96,  109, 
166,  197,  201. 

Mrs.  John  James,  mother,  3, 

5,  7,  9,  12,  17,  35,  36.  83,  94, 110, 
192,  201. 

Art  Museum,  165. 

famHy,  4-8,  52,  95. 

family,  arms  of,  50. 


Salvator  Rosa,  76. 
Savonarola,  105,  162. 
Schaffhausen,  14,  38,  200. 
Scotland,  3,  13,  55. 
Scott,  Sir  W.,  4,  5,  9,  23,  28,  113, 
157,  163,  208. 

Sir  Gilbert,  157. 

Sesame  and  Lilies,  111,  113. 


Seven  Lamps,  52-62. 
Severn,  Arthur,  109. 

Joseph,  36. 

Mrs.  A.,  4,  109,  110,  120,  159, 

208,  209. 
Shakespeare,  9,  26,  32,  47,  113,  128. 
Sheep/olds,  Construction  of,  79. 
Sheffield,  Art  Museum,  177. 
Shelley,  19,  32,  88,  203. 
Sidgwick,  H.,  73. 
Sizeranne,  M.  de  la,  2,  153. 
Skiddaw,  14,  21. 
Slade  Professorship,  121,  133,  138, 

149,  160,  161. 
Smith,  Adam,  73. 

Sydney,  1,  44. 

Sociocracy,  107. 

Solomon,  101. 

Sophia,  S.,  66. 

Sophocles,  113. 

Spencer,  Herbert,  73,  101,  143, 195. 

Spenser,  Edmund,  113. 

Spielmann,  153. 

"Sport,"  133, 192. 

Stanley,  Dean,  24,  35. 

Stevens,  A.,  125. 

Stones  of  Venice,  63,  65-77. 

Swift,  104,  112,  114, 115. 


Tadema,  Alma,  R.A.,  145, 147,148. 
Tay,  10,  13,  14. 
Taylor,  SirH.,  44. 
Telemachus,  Monk,  179. 
Tenniel,  129, 148. 
Tennyson,  19,  44,  94, 116. 
Thackeray,  96,  112. 
Theresa,  St.,  177. 
Theseus,  134, 189,  192. 
Thucydides,  36. 
Time  and  Tide,  104,  165. 
Tintoretto,  48,  51,  64,  65,  118,  131, 

159. 
Titian,  46,  90,  126.  131,  159. 


216 


JOHN  RUSKIN. 


Tolstoi,  149,  194. 
Tourgenieflf,  93. 
Toynbee,  Arnold,  138. 

Hall,  85. 

Turner,  Death  of,  80. 

introduced,   40  ;    praised,   42, 

43. 
Paintings,    39,    40,   119,   128, 

131,  159,  203. 

Rogers'  Italy,  39. 

Ruskin's  first  defence  of,  26. 

Tweddale,  family,  4,  5. 
Tyndall,  Professor,  158. 

U 

Uccelli,  Paolo,  131. 

"University  Extension,"  85,  89. 

"Settlements,"  85. 

Unto  this  Last,  91-101,  165,  209. 
Ursula,  St.,  156,  157. 


Val  d'Arno,  134. 


Venice,  46,  48,  49,  61,  63,  69,  74, 75, 

156. 
Vernon,  Diana,  135. 
Verona,  48,  75,  125. 
Victoria,  Queen,  68,  79. 
Victorian  Art,  Early,  69. 
Vivisection,  143. 

W 

Wandel,  The,  10,  13. 
Ward,  W.,164. 
Waterloo,  14. 
Watts,  G.  F.,  R.A.,  144. 
"Wealth,"  91,  100. 
Wellington,  Monument,  125. 
Wesley,  J.,  43, 138. 
Westminster  Abliey,  208. 
Whewell,Dr.,  78. 
Wordswortli,  21,  22,  203. 
Working  Men's  College,  84,  91, 109, 
164. 


Zwingli,  193. 


Printed  by  T.  and  A.  Constabi.k,  Printers  to  His  Majesty, 
at  the  Edinburgh  University  Press 


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